Instances where you can't separate the art from the artist. vs. instances where you can.

"Trust the art, not the artist" a smarter person than myself once said, and I find that it is a much easier concept in theory than actual application.

I think the most obvious case of being successful for me is with Miles Davis. Not very pleasant company, by most accounts. And yet, I find myself enjoying his music with each passing year. All those terrible accounts of him being a despicable person seem to just disappear when a record of his is playing. And I don't really have a reason for that other than that I really enjoy the music. Do I have any delusions of him being "oh, actually NOT like that at all!"? Not really. And I'm still able to look past it.

But with the recent discussion around a new Thurston Moore record being quite good and maybe his best work in quite some time, I just can't bring myself to listen to it because of how much I know about his personal life and non-music dealings. I have even tried to go back to older Sonic Youth albums in an attempt to rekindle old enthusiasm and I just can't enjoy them the same way I used to.

Why is this? Maybe it's because I sort of grew up with Sonic Youth and seeing how things fell apart so quickly and fantastically in real time was more immediate. With Miles, hearing about his personal shortcomings was like hearing about history or a folk tale — something that may have happened, sure, but it was in the past. . . almost intangible, just a half-truth, or something that could never happen again.

I'm not saying there is a right or a wrong to this — but I find it a very peculiar phenomenon with respect to art. I have seen and heard a lot of people over the past year denounce certain acts —and the music they used to enjoy— because of the artist's perceived political views. I can understand if the artist makes their politics their entire act, but that's overwhelmingly not the case with most of these scenarios. And besides, if you liked a song or an album before you knew the artist's ideals —and nothing about the recordings has changed— why do these cases come up where we can't allow ourselves to enjoy them any longer?

I've also got a semi-related sidebar addendum: I play guitar and use a lot of effects pedals in my music. I bought a pedal a while back (well over a year ago) from a particular brand and have used it a lot and enjoyed it a lot. It's a very well-made product. In the midst of the chaos that has been this year, the owner and founder of the pedal company made some fairly disparaging and disheartening remarks and a lot of the gear community has denounced them. Guitar Center even went as far as cutting ties with the company completely. Now I have this pedal —that I still think is great for what it is, btw— with a company name on it that is associated with bigotry and chauvinism. It's not a unique effect —I could get a similar one from another brand easily— but I'm pretty happy using the one I have. I put a sticker over the front plate, so the brand name and logo isn't visible anymore and I'm fine with that. However, if it were to come around that I was using a pedal from that now denounced company, there are some people that would be critical of me. Now, if I had known at the time of my purchase that the owner was the person that they are, I probably would not have bought it and opted for a different brand. But I didn't, so it's what I have. I still play my guitar with it and have a great time doing so. Why is that?

on your effects pedal sidebar addendum: i think you feel ok with it for a good reason, which is that you didn't purchase it to support hatred or bigotry, and if you would have known about it ahead of time, you would've given your money to someone else instead. so now you have this object that you have liberated from the bosom of its bigoted maker. you can think of it like a troubled dog that has now found it's forever home.

on the wider art vs artist, i'm not sure how i draw the line. it's not consistent, whatever it is. case by case i guess.

Can you elaborate on the situation with Moore? The only thing I know about that people are holding against him is that he dared to cheat on and divorce our beloved queen, Kim Gordon. Is there something else?

I'm not saying there is a right or a wrong to this — but I find it a very peculiar phenomenon with respect to art. I have seen and heard a lot of people over the past year denounce certain acts —and the music they used to enjoy— because of the artist's perceived political views. I can understand if the artist makes their politics their entire act, but that's overwhelmingly not the case with most of these scenarios. And besides, if you liked a song or an album before you knew the artist's ideals —and nothing about the recordings has changed— why do these cases come up where we can't allow ourselves to enjoy them any longer?

that's a good question. there's a certain prog band from Tennessee whose music I enjoyed a lot until I saw them liking Trump's tweets, clicking on them and realizing they follow all the FOX anchors, all the Trumps, etc. - now I still can listen to them but I have a hard time being a 'fan' because in my view if you support Trump and the Republican party than you are a bigot who straight up does not care about human life or the future of this planet and possibly thinks my kids belong in a dog kennel. of course it's kind of dumb to feel this way, they're from Tennessee and feature a lot of Christian themes in their work, of course they're almost certainly Republicans but actually seeing it is immensely disappointing

Interesting question. I generally don’t have trouble with this, but I think the ease of doing so depends how much of themselves the artist puts into their work. For example, Morrissey’s solo work for me is greatly overshadowed by what he’s become now, even in otherwise innocuous lyrics because it’s the personality too. Which isn’t to say I don’t still love Vauxhall & I, because I do.

Cosby is the first person I think of as someone I cannot separate from his work because so much of his career seemed devoted to constructing an utterly false persona to obfuscate how vile he really was. And it's an unfortunate example inasmuch as I wish that I could still enjoy the other delightful performances on The Cosby Show, but I just can't anymore.

^^^ excellent post

I hasten to say, however: I usually get back from my morning walk when The Cosby Show starts on syndication, and like a sucker I get wrapped in. I still love the show.

R. Kelly is a pretty obvious example too, you cannot hear any of his stuff now and not think "he's singing about fucking teenagers right now". only artist I've actually deleted out of my iTunes, I can't see myself ever wanting to hear his music again. whereas say, Michael Jackson, yeah it makes me uncomfortable but a lot of his seems pretty far removed from his actual persona

When it comes to those who I acknowledge as creeps and cretins and criminals but whose work still means enough to me that I am somehow able to separate the artist from the art, I feel like the absolute least I can do is a) find a way to experience their work that doesn't further benefit them monetarily and b) refrain from ever foisting their work upon or promoting it to anyone else.

Creeps/cretins/criminals aside, I do fall into thinking less of a public figure if they express political views that I consider to be seriously dumb or ill-informed. That happened to me this year in the case of a former indie-rock hero dude whose twitter I checked, and was a bit shook when I saw where he stands these days. It hasn't stopped me from listening to his older music, and I'm not a fan of his current stuff anyway, so I guess it hasn't tested my listening habits in that regard.

Thanks for everyone's insights thus far. Again: I'm not saying there is a right or a wrong answer to this, as I'm obviously wrestling with a few of these scenarios myself.

RE: Thurston
Yes, my discrepancy with his music stems from his adultery.

RE: Bill Cosby
This is a great example. I was such a huge fan of the show as a kid in my formative years and I loved his old albums from the 60s and 70s and I still feel a sense of great conflict about that older stuff in particular. Because the fact remains: some of his stand up material is still fucking funny, but I have a hard time putting the thought out of my head that there's a good possibility that he walked off the stage that night and did something reprehensible. Am I bad person for laughing at the jokes he told that had nothing to do with any of that?

Mark Kozelek (nothing post-2013 though). I am able to separate art from artist. Partly because I've always listened to music in a way that already disassociated the artist as a person/people, and would get swept up in the sound of the tune and the feeling that sound conveyed. The poetry that went along with the music would merely emphasize that mood, but I honestly I'd rarely even prioritize the meaning of the words at all. Robert Pollard's surreal paint-splattered-collage poetry is perfect for people like me, but even more straightforward narratives like Mark's ride backseat to the rest of what is going on in the sound design and performance. This seems like an elaborate excuse to hand wave away legitimate concerns, but honestly all music for me is a place I go, not a person.

On the politics side, I remember when Tobin Sprout's facebook presence was less professional and he was sharing anti-Obama memes before the Trump days... I think (bit of a fuzzy memory now). But same deal and there is no clear public indication on where he stands now so out of sight out of mind.

At the time the Cosby stuff started coming out, I had been following a blog called "Huxtable Hotness" - in which a young guy in NYC critiqued the wardrobe/fashion in each Cosby Show episode (in chronological order, one episode per post... it ran for several years). It was a terrific blog - warm, funny, appreciative of the show, etc. Once the news came out, the author let the blog fall dormant (I don't think he made any statement, he just stopped posting). Now the blog appears to be down (or "open to invited readers only"). I understand why he did it, but it is a real loss!

Yes, my discrepancy with his music stems from his adultery.

Out of your curiosity, was your upbringing a highly religious one?

Re: the Thurston Moore example, if "adultery" is the line you need to draw, so be it, but I feel like you are going to be spending a hell of a lot more time researching the private lives of musicians than you are listening to anything they'd make.

Michael Jackson was my favourite artist in the late 80s when I was aged 8-10. He seemed so unbelievably cool, like his image had been precision-engineered to be the absolute coolest thing a 8-10-year-old boy could imagine. Like in Moonwalker where he morphs into a spaceship and shoots the baddies? Or the motorbike ride video to Speed Demon? Who else was this aimed at? So yeah, I have difficulty listening to him now.

I just get more of a grimace of disappointment when listening to anything of Thurston's these days. It's not like on the face of it what he did was so abhorrent or beyond the pale but it just seemed beneath him and it wound up wreaking a lot of personal and professional havoc. Like I'm sure a lot of SY fans had some degree of investment in the band as a unit and Thurston and Kim as a couple so it just kinda sucked for him to blow it all up by being such a middle aged cliche.

I've also got a semi-related sidebar addendum: I play guitar and use a lot of effects pedals in my music. I bought a pedal a while back (well over a year ago) from a particular brand and have used it a lot and enjoyed it a lot. It's a very well-made product. In the midst of the chaos that has been this year, the owner and founder of the pedal company made some fairly disparaging and disheartening remarks and a lot of the gear community has denounced them. Guitar Center even went as far as cutting ties with the company completely. Now I have this pedal —that I still think is great for what it is, btw— with a company name on it that is associated with bigotry and chauvinism. It's not a unique effect —I could get a similar one from another brand easily— but I'm pretty happy using the one I have. I put a sticker over the front plate, so the brand name and logo isn't visible anymore and I'm fine with that. However, if it were to come around that I was using a pedal from that now denounced company, there are some people that would be critical of me. Now, if I had known at the time of my purchase that the owner was the person that they are, I probably would not have bought it and opted for a different brand. But I didn't, so it's what I have. I still play my guitar with it and have a great time doing so. Why is that?

― Totally different head. Totally. (Austin), Friday, September 25, 2020 12:19 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Which fulltone is it? ;)

xpost Like it's the kind of thing where people who are personally involved in a situation like that have probably figured out how to move on from it and have a more nuanced, situational perspective but for people on the outside who had a somewhat distanced and abstracted sense of the people/relationships involved, the perpetual reactions to their behavior just sorta hangs in this abstractedly-judgmental place. Expecting them to be paragons when they're just human beings who fuck up.

I just get more of a grimace of disappointment when listening to anything of Thurston's these days. It's not like on the face of it what he did was so abhorrent or beyond the pale but it just seemed beneath him and it wound up wreaking a lot of personal and professional havoc. Like I'm sure a lot of SY fans had some degree of investment in the band as a unit and Thurston and Kim as a couple so it just kinda sucked for him to blow it all up by being such a middle aged cliche.

Yeah, I get this reaction. Thurston and Kim were such a core part of the group and musicians that a lot of '90s indie rock fans looked up to, so it's natural I think for big SY fans to feel a little stung by the whole thing. I just have a problem putting him on the same level of an R Kelly or Bill Cosby.

this is mainly an issue for me when a 'serious artist man' type turns out to be abusing people. if i'm being really honest i'd say that the primary reason isn't that i find the behavior abhorrent (i do) but because i just can't take them seriously as an artist anymore. there's a sudden hollowness to what they were doing that i can't unhear. prince is a good example of this. still enjoy a song from time to time but don't revere him as an artist. wrt looking the other way with someone like miles davis or prince i would say that race places a role in who is absolved and who isn't. i'll just go ahead and say that i think that white people are less inclined to condemn black musicians for their abusive behavior.

there's also the factor of age and generations etc. abuse has been normalized to a horrifying degree now but i think it was probably even more normalized in the past. that doesn't excuse it but fuck it's just floating around everywhere and was kind of like the default for a lot of people in the 20th century. i think it starts to get interesting when people don't just condemn it as an individual action but start to ask what it means socially.

You would get laughed out of the room in many a culture if adultery was a dealbreaker for you when considering which artists you follow or not. I find the Puritanism itt deeply unsettling tbh. Like I’ve stepped into a parallel universe or something.

i love that we're even using the word 'adultery' itt

for an artist that wrote 'catholic block' ffs

it's natural I think for big SY fans to feel a little stung by the whole thing. I just have a problem putting him on the same level of an R Kelly or Bill Cosby.

― soaring skrrrtpeggios (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Friday, September 25, 2020 1:56 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

No, they're not really not in the same league at all, but I can understand the situation similarly affecting one's ability to separate art from artist nonetheless.

I'm not at all disturbed by the Moore-Gordon fracas because I didn't care about them as people and their iconicity anyway, and I love Sonic Youth.

You would get laughed out of the room in many a culture if adultery was a dealbreaker for you when considering which artists you follow or not. I find the Puritanism itt deeply unsettling tbh. Like I’ve stepped into a parallel universe or something.

― sock solipsist (pomenitul), Friday, September 25, 2020 2:06 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think you might be projecting the puritanism you're perceiving itt.

FWIW, the purview of the thread title on its own doesn't necessitate judgment at all.

like i personally believe cheating is wrong but i don't know the details of the personal relationship pact that was breached there (beyond zomg they were married) and i'm not really that interested in what that was / it's none of my business. cheating is imperfect behavior that deserves some privacy imo - abuse and misogyny on the other hand need to be made very public.

I consider the line to be a personal one, one that I personally have changed quite a bit in the past few years. There are shades and degrees. I get it.

That said, there are some things that I will honestly think less of you as a person if you support them (and before it is asked, if someone thinks less of me because I draw a line a particular place, I don't care - my days of wanting to please everyone are long gone - so it's perfectly fine if someone doesn't care about my feelings about them). I consider those things to be really obvious - if you are an enthusiastic supporter of Skrewdriver, proudly wear Burzum shirts, or rep for Ted Nugent's bufoonery, at best I think you're missing the plot; at worst you're just a piece of shit.

if you are an enthusiastic supporter of Skrewdriver, proudly wear Burzum shirts, or rep for Ted Nugent's bufoonery

have you ever met a real person who is one of these people you refer to?

2xp map otfm

FWIW, the SY sitch (and people's reactions to it) is a little more complex than simply 'OMG, can you believe a dude in a band cheated on his partner'.

cheating is imperfect behavior that deserves some privacy imo

I'm not an SY fan and none of it affects me - but Kim has made it public (I've read her accounting of the circumstances in an interview blurb or something); so if folks choose to weigh that in how they see Thurston, and you argue against that, you're sort of "taking his side" (no?)

Calling the SY grievances itt "puritanism" totally ignores the specific context OL succinctly clarified upthread.

Not American and Protestant enough to get it, sorry. Peace.

have you ever met a real person who is one of these people you refer to?

I do not share any of Ted Nugent's political beliefs, but I like the albums he made between 1975 and 1980 quite a bit.

ok fair points. i can't recall much about the kim / thurston thing other than there was some underhanded and deceptive behavior but it wasn't an abusive situation. is that a fair summary? xp

lol to unperson.

I actually think a lot of burzum stuff kicks ass but while I could listen to burzum when I was a 20 year old (a 20 year old communist who hated nazis for sure, but very callow) I can't bring myself to listen to him now. like I'm not giving him plays on fucking Spotify.

also won't be listening to red house painters again.

but for some reason was singing "rock with you" in the shower the other day ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

have you ever met a real person who is one of these people you refer to?

I just posted a link to a YouTube video in the Rolling Metal thread a few weeks ago of a professional critic for a not unknown metal website that featured a prominent Burzum wall hanging in the background. But yeah, I still spot Burzum t-shirts in the wild. Now, how "proud" or knowing the wearer might be, I can't speak to, but they are out there.

saw a Burzum shirt in the wild a couple weeks ago

in general, I think it's easier for instrumental music and gets harder the more prominent confessional, personal lyrics and vocals are for the music.

Not American and Protestant enough to get it, sorry. Peace.

What's funny is this is sort of a cousin of that creepy line you see sometimes - "Hey, let go of your Protestant, American, middle-class hang-ups... just do this..."

god triad is so barf

I know, but I'm gonna put on Crown of Creation right now... it cracks me up when Grace sings it.

Chris Brown is one I feel slightly guilty liking so much, though am only headlines-aware of his abuse, what, a decade ago? If I see a "feat Chris Brown" track on an album, that's consistently a favorite. His acting ("Takers") impressed me, too. Whereas, oddly, Ariana Grande licked a donut and has forever lost my respect. She seems to be doing just fine without it, though.

I think Rolf Harris is maybe a perfect example of someone who has totally destroyed their own image. I'm not a fan and never intended to check him out though.

What's funny is this is sort of a cousin of that creepy line you see sometimes - "Hey, let go of your Protestant, American, middle-class hang-ups... just do this..."

Slippery slope much?

Unless someone provides solid evidence that Thurston Moore abused Kim Gordon in some way (in her memoir, Kim accuses him of being a coward for not initiating the divorce himself, which is… utterly banal), 'adultery' is a backwards charge that smacks of, yes, puritanism of the worst tabloid variety. It's none of our fucking business.

kozelek has a few earlier albums that meant something to me, and i still listen to them, but i have zero interest in hearing anything new from him (meaning like the last decade-plus)

none of the other prime examples are particularly important to me -- i would absolutely never buy a nugent or r. kelly record or otherwise contribute money to them, but 'stranglehold' is a great song and if it comes on the radio i'm not gonna turn it off

the thurston stuff is distasteful -- lots of people cheat, but doing it for years on end is pretty damn rude -- but whatever, really. i do kinda wonder how jim o'rourke feels about the whole thing tho

pom, people have parasocial relationships with musicians, they feel hurt by the person's behavior as if it were someone they knew. I don't get that perspective but it's how some people's brains work

Fair enough. I guess I don't get it either – artists are as fallible as the rest of us, sometimes even more so. And as far as shitty rock star behaviour goes, this is bottom-tier material at best.

I try not to think about Al Green beating his pregnant wife with a boot when I listen to Al Green, because I like listening to Al Green. But it happened. Should I try less hard?

When I can remember who made the record or what it's called. Or where I left it

It helps that I only expected diminishing returns from Burzum, Morrissey and Kozelek, made it easy to give them up. But I generally don't stop buying things by bad people.

FTR, only Austin actually used the term "adultery" when discussing the Thurston/Kim thing.

aiui the complication with the Sonic Youth situation is that Thurston drove another bandmember out of the group by having an affair with his girlfriend, years before the bandmember to whom Moore was married found out about the still-continuing affair

xp now named ^

At the time the Cosby stuff started coming out, I had been following

When it started coming out, or when Hannibal Buress was pointing out onstage that googling "bill cosby rapist" would bring up years of news stories about accusations and settlements?

have a lot of thoughts about this

sometimes knowing an artist is a huge shitbag before anything concrete comes out helps me sit better with being able to "separate" things, even though i also think it's really impossible to totally separate the artist from their actions and that all art contains some reflection of its maker's heart, so this exercise is also real theoretical and conflicted from the jump. kozelek made a few records that were the soundtrack to some of the most treasured moments in my life. as far as i'm concerned, he can't have those, so i'll always be able to listen to early rhp and sun kil moon on that level. (note: i haven't even tried to listen to either since the most recent reports came out, so maybe i won't be able to after all!) it feels cynical and shitty to say this but i feel like something will come out about stephan jenkins of third eye blind eventually and this will probably not disturb my ability to listen to the first few 3eb records because on some level i've always weighed my enjoyment of those records against stephan jenkins' personality, which is like what if a wall street sociopath got into music

then again i was an absolutely devoted brand new fan and thought i could maybe maintain the distance if a few years passed but nope. too many lyrics i can read back and think "he was singing about what he was doing... the entire time..."

sorry this feels really scattered bc it's really complicated

I'll admit I am maybe disproportionately upset about the Derrick May accusations, but that may just be because this sorta thing has finally come home to roost for me with an artist I really love. I dgaf about Kozelek, Burzum, Chris Brown, etc. I really enjoy the work of Cosby, Sonic Youth, R Kelly, Woody Allen, Gira, etc (not sure Miles Davis fits here, but him too), but I could live without them if I had to. Like if the doctor said "give up Snickers bars or be dead in six months," I'd give up Snickers bars. But I've spent untold hours listening to Derrick May. It'd be more like the doctor saying "give up coffee or be dead in six months." But I guess we all have our thresholds, right? I don't know, maybe because it's so recent, but this one really sucks for me

It may be instructive for people who still aren't getting the SY sitch to note that no one itt has said anything like 'I can't abide the creative work of adulterers!' It's a weirdly myopic truncation of the situation, it isn't being applied as a blanket judgment of artists across the board, and the thread topic is inherently subjective and not meant to be an imposition of values on anyone else itt.

I think people keep going back to Thurston because a) he was the second musician listed by name in the original post, and b) because his is very much a marginal case when put up against people like R Kelly, Bill Cosby and Woody Allen, no matter what your feelings are on the band or his personal life.

I definitely think it's unfair to lump Thurston in with actual abusers and the like, but I also have a bit of a disappointed/instinctive "bleurgh" reaction when my mates go see him or sign to his record label or hang out with him or whatever. I think it's more like when your parents split up and you find out your dad had an affair - no, it's not unpardonable, but you were personally invested in that relationship and dad totally fucked it up, the bastard!

But yeah, I think for people who didn't grow up with Kim & Thurston being Cool Mum & Dad, it's difficult to understand how anyone would care so much.

In a way, the thread topic is implicitly about the disconnect between internal and external manifestations of morality, so it only makes sense that it would veer too far in one direction (having an adverse reaction to an artist who cheated on their partner even though we all likely know and have forgiven someone in that situation) as it would in the other (continuing to enjoy the work of an artist who is an inarguably-monstruous human being).

Answering the thread question: generally I can still enjoy the works of someone that I encountered and enjoyed before I found out they were shitty (in whatever big or small way that rankles me).

The Smiths and the first couple of Morrissey solo singles are still fine (I enjoyed the 2004ish comeback singles a bit at the time, but he started talking more and more given the opportunity). I'd disregarded R Kelly for 15 years after not liking She's Got That Vibe, got drawn in by ILM enthusiasm circa Trapped In The Closet episodes being YSIed off Chicago radio, still find lots his 2005-2007 run of "featuring" singles thrilling if I hear them, but cut off listening completely once I bothered to read up on his court cases and the accounts of people who'd stopped working for him. I could still read and marvel at Brendan McCarthy's 1980s comics with Peter Milligan if I was in the mood, and love Mad Max Fury Road, but will not reread his Doctor Strange comic or Vic Fluro collab.

It's also generally easier to separate the artist when the art isn't a deliberate communication of their attitudes.

Wait, what the fug has Brendan McCarthy done?!

I definitely think it's unfair to lump Thurston in with actual abusers and the like, but I also have a bit of a disappointed/instinctive "bleurgh" reaction when my mates go see him or sign to his record label or hang out with him or whatever. I think it's more like when your parents split up and you find out your dad had an affair - no, it's not unpardonable, but you were personally invested in that relationship and dad totally fucked it up, the bastard!

― emil.y, Friday, September 25, 2020 4:06 PM (thirty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm

OL, I assume this is what sic is referring to:

https://mindlessones.com/2013/11/09/flashback-to-fever-brendan-mccarthy-race-and-seeing-whats-in-front-of-your-face/

Hitchcock got weird and creepy toward actresses IRL late in his career, and women get treated weirdly and creepily more and more in his later films. It feels clammier to watch women being strangled in Frenzy than to see two specific characters suffering from the psychological obsession of the lead in Vertigo. But yr also more likely to rewatch the imperial period films because they're better, not just because you know the director was sending murdered toys of his leads to their daughters.

wish I shared this same ability to assign blame in the failed marriages of total strangers, it seems almost like a superpower

the thurston thing makes me think he's kind of a jerk and affects me to the extent that it makes me less interested in checking out any of his solo work, but on the other hand it doesn't really change my feelings about the work he did as a member of SY

successful marriage imo, they had decades together and made loads of great art during their partnership

The one that has hit me recently is Avi Buffalo. I really loved that first album in a way I've loved little else in the past decade and in a way that has pretty much ruled out continued listens, because I bought into the romance of it and now that's utterly sullied.

https://pitchfork.com/news/avi-buffalo-accused-of-rape-by-former-bandmate-music-pulled-by-sub-pop/

Sorry, that makes it sound like I'm the victim, not Rebecca Coleman, but you know what I mean.

Only similar case for me is Crystal Castles but the fact Alice Glass is the singer makes them not so hard to carry on listening to (not that I do very often).

FWIW, the SY sitch (and people's reactions to it) is a little more complex than simply 'OMG, can you believe a dude in a band cheated on his partner'.

Not by much imo

successful marriage imo, they had decades together and made loads of great art during their partnership

I'm probably a bad person for this thread, though, because I can't think of any instances where I am unable to separate the art from the artist.

Spirit Counsel was really good btw.

Lotta willful obtuseness goin on itt wrt the purview as stated in the thread title.

xposts

More like Marriage Counsel, amirite.

Anyway, I've talked about this so much elsewhere (in relation to metal, primarily) that I'd rather not shit up this thread with my Opinion, but I will say that explicitly white supremacist lyrics are a dealbreaker for me. Otherwise, I find it quite easy to distinguish between the two.

2xp

I responded to the question raised by the thread title!

explicitly white supremacist lyrics are a dealbreaker for me

But lyrics are part of the art, not the artist.

Sure, but they explicitly de-artify the art by using it as a vehicle for heinous propaganda.

Whenever that happens, the implication always seems to be: 'listen to what *I*, enlightened citizen X, have to say about this pressing political matter'.

Which isn't to say that the work of art vanishes in the process, it just becomes more difficult to separate the artist from their art than it might be otherwise.

I agree but what I mean is that being unable to listen to something because of the lyrics does not reflect an inability to separate the art from the artist. It is rejecting the art because of one aspect of the artwork itself.

Unless you mean that it makes you unable to listen to anything else by the artist, even if it is instrumental or has non-racist lyrics.

I don't listen to "One in a Million" but the racist lyrics on that song don't get in the way of listening to "Sweet Child o' Mine".

I see what you're saying, but I suppose I view that aspect of the artwork as the artist's non-artistic message, which is bound up with whoever the artist happens to be (as a public figure, at least).

2xp and no, it doesn't have a bearing on whether I'm able to listen to their other works.

Terrific stuff, Sund4r and pom. This is exactly what I alluded to earlier when I said that *I personally* would understand why anyone would just stop listening to an act if they made the political or agenda into their entire art. Am I able to say, "Hey these lyrics about hating Black people are just words in a song and this has a solid groove, so whatevs"? No, I'm not able to personally do that.

Sorry. Work has been busy today. Just wanted to pop back in with a few more things. . .

It may be instructive for people who still aren't getting the SY sitch to note that no one itt has said anything like 'I can't abide the creative work of adulterers!' It's a weirdly myopic truncation of the situation, it isn't being applied as a blanket judgment of artists across the board, and the thread topic is inherently subjective and not meant to be an imposition of values on anyone else itt.

― OrificeMax (Old Lunch), Friday, September 25, 2020 1:02 PM

Thank you for this. And I'd like to add that my initial post drew the comparison with Thurston and Miles because of the obvious contradiction in my thoughts about those two people. Miles was much more prolific and violent in his abuse than Thurston was (in his relatively harmless by comparison) cheating on his wife. And yet: I give Miles' music the pass — WHY? <-this was my whole thought on starting a topic like this. I don't have the answer, I just wantd to discuss with you fine folks in the hopes that maybe someone could relate. So, thank you all.

(also, idk why "adultery" it's not like that's a favorite vocabulary word or anything; it's just the word I used at that moment, no extra thought behind it)

(and no, I was not raised in an especially strict or religious family — but there was rampant infidelity on both sides with my parents in their various dealings)

And, finally:

Which fulltone is it? ;)

― 📺👁️ (peace, man), Friday, September 25, 2020 11:51 AM

lol the Supa Trem Jr. It's such a killer tremolo and that's an effect I use all the time. I wanted to be all badass when that stuff first came out and smash it with a sledgehammer. . . but dammit, that's a solid trem! Like I said, I know I could get a similar one from somebody else, but I've had it for about two years now and I just vibe with it, so it's hard to think of parting with it. Besides, I had an Earthquaker Devices sticker that was the perfect size to cover it up, so I think that's funny enough to merit its' keeping by itself lol.

Thanks for expanding on that, Austin, and apologies if I came across as aggressive (likewise to OL). I guess you could say that I've always taken 'Kill Yr. Idols' to heart, so I expect nothing from artists other than quality art – I'd almost invariably come out disappointed otherwise.

The nexus of the crisis and the origin of storms (Sund4r) at 5:56 25 Sep 20

I don't listen to "One in a Million" but the racist lyrics on that song don't get in the way of listening to "Sweet Child o' Mine".

Axl and the band did remove the song from the reissue box set so they agree apparently

I'd almost invariably come out disappointed otherwise.

I think I said something similar on another thread fairly recently in that I consider myself the worst kind of cynic: I'm not surprised by the negative outcome, but nonetheless allow myself to be disappointed by as if I were.

Never said I was smart.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have a bunch of these, on both sides, will write more later, good question and the answer is ultimately subjective IMO

I feel like the Reynolds/Press book "The Sex Revolts" gets into this territory a little bit altho it is primarily concerned w/ lyrical conduct/nattartor posing as opposed to IRL horrible behavior

*narrator

https://medium.com/@leahcallahansings/if-indie-rock-had-been-called-trust-fund-rock-i-never-would-have-been-fooled-into-thinking-b20694bfe045

that looks really good, thanks

No worries, pom! I've just been trying to help keep discussion itt on the road as much as I'm able. And yeah, after the rash of revelations in recent years, I just expect at this point to be disappointed by all public figures in one way or another.

Just to clarify, Sund4r (and others), if I'm reading a manifesto written by some Julius Evola-worshipping trve black metal dude and it contains explicitly antisemitic passages, as a general rule I'm not going to argue that it's hard for me to separate the author from his screed just because I only know (of) the former through the latter. In an artistic context (including a literary one), it's trickier insofar as the artwork is endowed with a life of its own and may thus speak for itself without necessarily pointing back to its 'creator' in the way a signed open letter published in a magazine does. Yet this does not preclude the possibility, for the artist, to embed overt political slogans into their work in order to deliberately muddy the waters.

I usually give artists the benefit of the doubt and acknowledge (more readily than most listeners, I think) that hateful lyrical material can often be attributed to an edgy theatrical persona. But if you're a notorious neo-nazi activist in your day-to-day life, chances are that you're including white supremacist discursive elements in your lyrics because you want your art to stand for your ideological beliefs. Granted, art is such that, even the most explicitly political lyrics are partly transformed by their deployment in an aesthetic context, but that only works up to a point since the artist may self-consciously choose to minimize the aesthetic dimension of their art for the sake of political sloganeering, thus aggressively testing the boundaries of what we conventionally deem to be the realm of 'art'. In such instances, it is the artist who does everything within their power to ensure that the artwork will not be separated from their ideology, in which case, yes, it becomes more difficult (albeit never impossible!) to simply say 'here is the work, on the one hand, and there is the artist, on the other'.

So if I'm listening to Burzum's 'Dunkelheit' (lyrics), it's fairly easy for me to disregard everything I know about the man's politics because neither the music nor the words need that context to make sense – the song can easily stand on its own, as an instance of Dark Neo-Romanticism or whatever. Conversely (and I've used this example in the past), when Peste Noire is literally covering the Action française's chant on an album that features lead singer Famine intoning 'Sieg heil' in addition to praise directed at 'the French race', I certainly don't feel the need to separate the art from the artist, and neither does he, apparently! The message, then, is tantamount to: 'I fucking dare you to distinguish between this music and the values we openly espouse as non-artistic, political agents!' There's no winning in such a scenario if you're exclusively committed to aesthetic autonomy (and I am almost all the time).

I think for me any expression of hate towards a particular group of people is one instance where I would most decidedly get off the bus with a given artist. I don't even care how much they 'mean' it: if they're putting it out in the world, others will rally around it.

Tbc if I'm listening to a metal record and I realize, through garbled shrieks, that explicit white supremacist bullshit is being disseminated, I don't feel the need to double-check whether the band really is made up of 14 worders or not. But if you're raging at Jesus and his followers (also counts as hateful lyrical material, lest we forget), it's safe to assume we're in the presence of a hammy act.

One last thing. When I speak of the importance of giving artists the benefit of the doubt, I'm thinking of cases such as the (now totally stale) controversy surrounding the lyrics to Slayer's 'Angel of Death', which basically boils down to: 'they wrote a song from the perspective of a nazi, ergo they are nazis themselves'.

uhh doesn't sound like u wanna give Crass' "Reality Asylum" the benefit of the doubt there in yr previous post.

one barometer I use with this stuff is the useful punching up vs. punching down distinction. I have lots of time for "fuck Christianity" sentiments, but p much zero tolerance for e.g. anti-semitic "jokes" or sexism in my music.

see also: hell yes to Sun City Girls "Kill The Klansmen"

now that I think abt it, SCG are a good example of an artist where I choose to separate their sometimes pretty explicit anti-semitism from their often amazing music

Nico pretty much gets a pass doesn't she

I’m obv. cool with confrontational political lyrics that are in tune with my own beliefs. I do tend to find such songs kind of hollow, though.

Haven't read through the thread, but great idea. I was talking about this constantly with various friends around the time Chuck Berry died.

Generally--generally--I'm still okay with the art when I find out the person who made it did (or said, or thought) x, y, or z. When it comes down to cases there are exceptions, with many factors involved...time has a lot to do with it; the farther you recede into the past, the less likely I am to be bothered.

the Avi Buffalo story was gutting.

that's a good example of an act where the lyrics were enjoyably morose and cutting, and as someone with a self-loathing streak a mile wide, there's some identification at work (gulp), but then you learn something of the author's character and it colors them differently forever, as with Brand New. (who, tbh, I still listen to, but only the latter-day albums - the really emo stuff is unbearable for me now)

Yeah I didn't particularly associate Avi Buffalo with self-loathing but I agree that it's the identification thing that's a big factor in whether I can separate art and artist or not. The other thing that makes a difference is that it was against a bandmate.

Time is of course the other big thing, both in terms whether the offence/offensiveness occurred contemporaneously with the art, and just the distance at which you're seeing it. I'm surely more relaxed about enjoying Gauguin's paintings than I would be if he was born 100 years later.

Maybe if I discovered Avi Buffalo's music in 2070 rather than now I could appreciate it.

When I was a teenager, I strongly identified with the bands I looked up to, an attitude that progressively mutated into partial identification with the persona(s) being projected by the music itself. Fwiw I've never wanted to meet my favourite artists, since it's their art I care about in the first place.

once i was walking near my old apartment in brooklyn and bob dylan jumped out of the shadows and yelled "boo!," startling me and causing me to fall backwards and suffer a concussion. still like his music but you know

This seems to be tied so much to vocals. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say they wouldn't listen to a Phil Spector production because he left a gun lying around so that a houseguest carelessly tripped and fell onto it murdered someone, yet his sonic fingerprint is all over Be My Baby etc. The guy's an absolute monster, yet people are worrying more about Thurston Moore because they feel like he was their friend or something.

I feel like an this point I've read at least a book's worth of post about people rationale for listening listening to Burzum or not. remember being pretty blown away when I got curious and was like THIS is what people tie themselves in knots about?

Do you like black metal at all?

I avoid Phil Spector stuff (fortunately it’s pretty easy).

xpost not that much here and there something sticks

I will say Burzum's Nazism is kind of brilliant marketing because it tends to obscure the fact he's a sociopath and murderer

not a monster on the scale of Thurston Moore but still

Brand New. (who, tbh, I still listen to, but only the latter-day albums - the really emo stuff is unbearable for me now)

― get a mop and a bucket for this Well Argued Prose (Simon H.), Saturday, September 26, 2020 6:13 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

what really ruined the whole thing for me was relistening to “jesus”

xp lol

Vikernes no longer describes himself as a nazi, he's just an Odinist now. Phew, crisis averted!

Anyway, I've also said this elsewhere but: I would never purchase Burzum merch, let alone wear any. And while I do still listen to his stuff (including his later albums, which mostly suck), I neither buy nor stream anything by him.

i mean obv jesse lacey’s actions ruined the whole thing for me, but that successfully destroyed the idea i’d be able to return to their music, even the songs i loved the most (“1996”) with any kind of distance

I'm not sure I would be still be mad at Moore for cheating on Gordon even if I were their friend.

I find De Sade interesting because after all the conversations about whether to ban his work had finished, this thread's conversation never really came up. Everyone knows going in that he's a monster and that seems to be fairly consistent with his work.

I would have thought Charles Manson would be similar but I don't know if his music was violent. Of course he is nearer to us in time and some people who should seem to know better had a weird idolization of him.

if I was listening to someone's record and they were outside murdering someone, I'd let the album play until the murder was complete, to give them the chance to stop murdering

now, what about musicians who have actually killed people with their music

I mean, 'Enter Sandman' was repurposed as a torture device at Guantanamo Bay.

I'm not sure I would be still be mad at Moore for cheating on Gordon even if I were their friend.

I think it works the opposite way, no? If you’re someone’s friend, you have something invested in working through the fact that they may have been a jerk, and continuing the (actual) relationship.

If your only relationship with an artist is their music, and you get a negative association whenever you think about listening to it (for whatever reason at all), it’s easy to just put on something else.

When a friend bores me, I put on something else.

But why would an artist's infidelity and breakup give you a negative association if your only relationship with them is with their music? To feel that way, you'd have to have something invested in them as people, even if the relationship is just in your head (which it p much definitely would be).

re: brand new i also found it impossible to go back to them after everything came out about jesse's actions. when there's so much lyrical self-loathing in his work but you find out he's actually done monstrous things that really completely changes the context

i still wouldn't have wanted to go back after those revelations even if that wasn't part of their music but it does just make it feel worse to hear again if that makes any sense

Manson's music sucks ass just private press hippie garbage

But why would an artist's infidelity and breakup give you a negative association if your only relationship with them is with their music?

Old Lunch and others have given some reasons!

Beyond that, I don’t think the reasons really matter. IMO, no one needs to justify listening to Chuck Berry or Phil Spector or whoever (well, I dunno about Charles Manson...); but, also, no one needs to justify saying “Ehhhhh...” when it comes to an artist who once licked a donut, or said something they didn’t like in an interview once, etc.

I feel like an this point I've read at least a book's worth of post about people rationale for listening listening to Burzum or not. remember being pretty blown away when I got curious and was like THIS is what people tie themselves in knots about?

This x1000. Even judged by the standards of black metal, Burzum music is...not good.

Any, uh, Lostprophets (ex-)fans here? I've never heard their music and I sure as hell won't be checking it out now (in part because I don't care for nu metal/emo to begin with), but I do wonder how the fanbase reacted upon finding out.

Even judged by the standards of black metal

Hey, at least you're not camouflaging your bias.

Old Lunch and others have given some reasons!

They are all reasons that involve some kind of projected investment in the artist as a person.

which is fair enough but I think it's equally fair in that case for me to make a comparison of how I imagine I'd feel if I had an actual personal connection to the artist.

I never really got into Burzum's music either but I do love a lot of the music on Transilvanian Hunger, which has some deplorable lyrical messages.

Fenriz and Nocturno Culto have since issued an official apology, which helps (a bit).

Yeah, probably also that the lyrics are screamed unintelligibly in a language I don't speak

That too. Betcha BM lyrics would be significantly less edgy on average if clean singing were the norm.

For all I know, they're actually singing the words to "Don't Stop Believin'" and just writing some shit in the printed 'lyrics'.

I believe it.

Don't stop.

Hold on to that [unintelligible]

I think it's equally fair in that case for me to make a comparison of how I imagine I'd feel if I had an actual personal connection to the artist.

It’s totally fair of you to do that—I apologize if I somehow implied it wasn’t.

I don’t find it at all bizarre that ppl have “investments” in who artists are, as people—it just seems like human nature—but I guess not everyone does this, which is fine, but surely folks who don’t can’t understand why others do.

*can understand

I saw White Riot last night, the documentary on Rock Against Racism. Pretty good--less music than I was hoping for.

One of the things that prompted RAR was Eric Clapton's comments about immigration in '78--I knew about those, if not the Enoch Powell connection. (Not sure if even knew about Powell before last night.) I was never much of a fan of Clapton on his own, so there was nothing there for me to turn my back on. Irrational or not, I remain a big Cream fan; in my mind, there's Cream and there's Clapton, and there's no interference there.

Maybe that has something to do with Cream pre-dating his comments by years, because what I didn't know was that Rod Stewart said almost exactly the same thing. It turns up in the film briefly, and took me a couple of minutes to confirm on the internet, to find the quote independent of the film--there's not a lot out there, the comment seems to have mostly been lost to history.

"I think Enoch Powell is the man", proclaimed Rod Stewart. "I’m all for him. This country is overcrowded. The immigrants should be sent home."

That's going to be a lot trickier for me. I hold the Rod Stewart of his first four albums (up to '72) in such high regard; I almost view early Rod Stewart as some world that belongs solely to me. His comment dates to 1970. I'll leave my reaction for the next time I hear "You Wear It Well" or "Gasoline Alley" on the radio. The experience will be the same as ever, or it'll be different. I'll know when it happens.

The film also reminded me of Siouxsie Sioux and Sid Vicious's penchant for swastikas (contrasted with some inspiring words from Lydon/Rotten in support of RAR). Vicious--there's a real person in there somewhere, the guy who was Lydon's friend--has probably been abstracted right out the picture for a lot of people with regards to the Sex Pistols' music, a strange footnote after-the-fact, so I don't know that he's a big problem. Siouxsie Sioux seems to have a dedicated fanbase on ILM, and I recently listed "Hong Kong Garden" on a list of my favourite movie-music moments (Marie Antoinette). Does she get a situational pass (young, shock value)? I'm not saying she should, I'm legitimately asking.

there was a lot of discussion abt early punks and swastikas on the Joy Division thread at some point, I'm pretty sure Siouxsie came up as well. iirc the general consensus was that it was stupid but since she never doubled down or anything it was mostly written off as a dumb kid thing.

so often, it's how somebody reacts to an initial accusation that influences how I feel about this stuff. Like the way Michael Gira reacted to Larkin Grimm was so awful that I haven't listened to any Swans music since, and sold all the more recent stuff.

I can't listen to Gira any more. The punk stuff including Siouxsie is also massively disingenuous and a lie

The two musical highlights of the film were a minute of X-Ray Spex opening up the climactic RAR festival with "Oh Bondage! Up Yours!"--god, that voice--and Jimmy Pursey joining the Clash for "White Riot." The Clash wanted him up there; Sham 69's fanatical fanbase was, to put it mildly, not in sync with RAR and the parallel anti-Nazi movement. I don't know if he explicitly disowned such fans--I would hope--but joining in there was a clear message (and the performance was great).

Siouxsie has since expressed serious regret about the swastikas, it was just a provocative thing and not reflecting any actual support for nazis.

Syd of course didn't get a chance to do the same, Johnny Rotten always speaks very fondly of him as a fucked up kid who was used by everyone, feel like that really isn't the whole story though

The film also reminded me of Siouxsie Sioux and Sid Vicious's penchant for swastikas (contrasted with some inspiring words from Lydon/Rotten in support of RAR). Vicious--there's a real person in there somewhere, the guy who was Lydon's friend--has probably been abstracted right out the picture for a lot of people with regards to the Sex Pistols' music, a strange footnote after-the-fact, so I don't know that he's a big problem

Rotten wore a swastika as well.

There you go.

Johnny Rotten, 1978 (quoted in the film): “I despise them,” the singer said then of Powell and his National Front. “No one should have the right to tell anyone they can't live here because of the color of their skin or their religion...How could anyone vote for something so ridiculously inhumane?”

John Lydon, 2016: “The working class have spoke and I’m one of them and I’m with them,” Rotten said, adding of Trump: “There’s many, many problems with him as a human being but he’s not (racist) and there just might be a chance something good will come out of this situation because he terrifies politicians...This is joy to behold...Dare I say (Trump could be) a possible friend.” Rotten went on to say that the “left-wing media in America are trying to smear (Trump) as a racist, and that’s not true.”

http://theoutline.com/post/1315/johnny-rotten-would-hate-john-lydon?zd=1&zi=gzwueypo

Exhausting.

whatever was good about Lydon in the 70s had completely curdled by the end of the 90s, no point asking him about anything now.

Yeah--he's been such a cartoon for such a long time that the forcefulness and clarity of the quote from '78 caught me off guard last night.

If Miles music had lyrics, and they were about how much he respects women and would never beat them up it might be tougher to listen to him in 2020.

He did make an album called Bitches Brew (Betty's idea, apparently).

The bitches, they’re brewing.

I'm surprised that quote of Rod Stewart's never got the traction the Clapton statements did. I'd never once heard about that.

I didn’t know this stuff about Miles... don’t think it was mentioned in his autobiography (lol).

The artists I come back to the most---Joni Mitchell, Dylan, Bowie, Prince, for instance---don't inhabit any singular persona as artists, and *that's* what I can't separate from those artists.

Re Rotten: https://youtu.be/CwpyZ48MawQ?t=66

I didn't know that about Stewart either btw.

i haven't listened to gira or swans since it came out, despite really loving the two shows i got to see before i found out. gira's singing and subject matter is already very dark and psychologically aggressive and vulnerable and needy in some ways - to have all that wrapped up in grimm's story is just too much to handle. also, the fact that from her description, it sounds like she wasn't the only one.

any nico listeners here? i used to be, but fuck her

He probably wishes he knew all he knows now
When he was younger.

xp

The only place I’ve heard the bad Prince stuff is here on ILM. I don’t think it’s been broadly discussed at large?

Didn't know that Siouxsie had explicitly apologised so fair play, tbh it hadn't alienated me to the same extent as rapists like Gira. I'm not even generalising about what others *ought* to do, I just can't listen to him

Also no desire to listen to R Kelly any more and I'm not setting rules

yeah listening decisions are so subjective, I def can't point any fingers at anyone's listening choices when I have (and listen to) albums by Whitehouse and The Dwarves in my shelves

Echoing the above posts re Gira.

I also sold all my Roy Harper LPs fwiw, I knew there was another recent example

Harper was not guiltied in court and tbf I only love Flat Baroque but I still can't listen to him now

Speaking of Johnny Rottens shitty right wing stance, I think Mike Oldfield did an interview recently where he expressed support for both Trump and BoJo and I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to listen to his music since

i didn't know that about oldfield. you know, this might be the time to bust out a potential controp about mike oldfield: tubular bells fucking sucks

god it feels good to get that out there

More like Tubular Bell End amirite

The downside of ILM is finding out what you didn't want to know.

Rotten was not just right wing but playing a shit game that some Brit expats play when they're on US talk shows "waah they don't appreciate us", I can still listen to PIL and the Pistols, feel like he's no more of a dick now than he ever was and there's some misguided truth in the dickishness. Oldfield feels like he's probably always been a gentle posh kid with the appropriate prejudices?

I was playing an old Pearson Sound mix the other day and there was this Wiley verse in the middle of it and it was just incredibly uncomfortable, it just felt too soon. Considering Wiley is all over the last decade and a half's worth of British music, that's a hell of a lot that feels suddenly ruled out.

But again there's not many Oldfield records I listen to anyway

I think hearing the voice is the thing really, I mean we all know now what a terrible person Phil Spector was but it hasn't dulled the magic of those records at all for me.

Yeah the point of this thread is it's personal and not really logical

Had never heard the Stewart quote either till last night. (Rod Stewart? "Twisting the Night Away"/"(I Know) I'm Losing You"/"I'd Rather Go Blind" Rod Stewart?) I found the quote reproduced in a book called Don't Start Me Talking: Subculture, Situationism and the Sixties.

Did Lydon say Enoch Powell was a punk hero before or after that Outline article?

On a tv interview with Piers Morgan, Sinead O'Conner talked about Prince physically attacking her, so there's definitely some public discussion.

Sham 69 guy (frontman/singer I assume?) did speeches at some concerts trying to persuade his fans away from racism. Seemed deeply sincere when I seen him talking about this.

Jimmy Pursey always seemed like a sweetheart who wanted to fuck his nazi fan base off

lest we forget Pursey got a caution for indecent assault on a teenage girl.

From what I seen, he was pleading his fans not to go down the nazi road.

unfortunately while he was on the road to signing on the sex offenders registry it seems!

Was it genuinely at the same time?

the Thurston Moore thing -- it's definitely related to the "cool mum and dad" thing but also Moore presented himself as feminist -- it's also a persona thing. Also, it isn't just the lying and cheating, it's the stereotypical dude thing of leaving the foundational partner for a newer model because the male ego needs that kind of stroking. If He had left Kim for like, idk, Lydia Lunch, it would have been different (for me at least) than cheating with someone 20 years younger who wasn't particularly "impressive" in terms of accomplishments. Idk if that aspect of his persona wasn't something you considered part of his "appeal" then yeah, what he did is just nbd, but if you think of him and Sonic Youth being like, "honorary members of Riot Grrl" then the fact he turned out to be your standard superficial egotistical dude whose mid-life crisis takes that form? ... He's not a monster, just not admirable enough to differentiate himself from the massive numbers of smart white bro guitar jammers.

xp

no it was 2002, hence why I said "on the road to". I mean god knows, so many offenders in the music biz it would be much easier to make a list of the ones that aren't!

The tenderest of John Martyn songs always feel enhanced by the knowledge of what a shit he was. 'May you never' is the one I think this most about: "you hold no knives to stab me in my back and I know that there's those that do" so clearly laced with menace and paranoia but sung so sweetly and appealingly. It sounds to me so obviously a song by an addict or an abuser and it's precisely this souring of its loveliness that has always appealed to me, how inadvertantly it articulates the scraped bottom of pop music's nasty sentimentalism. Hating Martyn to me is key to loving his music as much as I do.

I don’t really think it’s fair to conflate male infidelity w/ antifeminism. Even as someone who was actually (close-secondhand) privy to this situation...there’s just no way to sift through someone else’s relationship dynamics...there are countless, sometimes more damaging if less evident betrayals and mistreatments than adultery in long-term relationships, wounds only the two people involved can understand, if they’re lucky.

xxp

I don’t really think it’s fair to conflate male infidelity w/ antifeminism.

i am connecting the specifics of the incident with feminist values ... but hey, I am assuming you were born with a penis and identify as male?

Also, this isn't about condemning Thurston Moore, this is about me explaining why I no longer think he is cool and why I have little to no interest in listening to his music.

But we don't know the actual specifics. We have the shape of a story that comports with sterotype—affair, younger woman—and that's it.

Uh, I'm somewhat personally familiar with the younger woman in question and she definitely fits the stereotype

(By specifics I don't mean that we don't know a ton of details—I mean the infinitely complex inner drama a relationship)

As am I.

Forget it, sarahell, it's 'I cannot differentiate between a subjective and not-entirely-rational stumbling block wrt a particular artist and condemnation of that artist's actions'-town.

Anyway I'm not hear to defend anyone, I'm just personally always reluctant to zoom in too closely on the personal lives of public people. Carry on.

ok I'm not getting "subjective and not-entirely-rational stumbling block" from Sarahel's post...it's pretty roundly condemning on the objective facts.

Well, Kim wrote a bit about it in her book. And various personal connections and online stuff ... idk ... whether you like or listen or support an artist's music as a private citizen/music fan is subjective to begin with! It's not like anyone has an ethical obligation to like, listen, or support certain music! And a lot of music fandom (esp. in terms of pop and pop-adjacent music) is about the artist's persona and that personal relationship with the listener, and some of it is superficial like that.

There's also a difference between a personal change of opinion based on an artist's behavior vs. joining a crusade to cancel them.

a lot of music fandom (esp. in terms of pop and pop-adjacent music) is about the artist's persona and that personal relationship with the listener

I've also thought of this point in relation to this discussion (and the folks who seem befuddled at the idea that listeners could be turned off to certain artists by non-musical factors)... everyone here has probably read a zillion artist profile/interviews, seen a zillion promo pics of artists looking "cool," etc. It's just part of how most of us consume music.

xxp I'm on board with all of that. TBH I am responding as much to the kneejerk reactions when all this went down by millions of people strictly on the basis of Kim's staus as feminist icon, w/o knowing very much else about the whole thing, much less knowing them as actual people

maybe they were reacting to the violation of the general principle that cheating on and lying to someone you purportedly love and respect is a sign of disrespect and is not loving behavior.

it isn't an esoteric thing! Having your partner cheat on you and lie to you about cheating is very painful and shitty! I think a lot of people have experienced this!

it is, agreed

xp no doubt, and w/o the greater context of respective behaviors over the course of thirty years that don't make it into the paper—and people's own hangups and flaws and fears and coping mechanisms and so on. (Again I'm not weighing in on the justification of anyone's actions here, because I can't. It's impossible.)

are you saying that she had cheated on him in the past? or that she had become a toxic partner or ...?

Sarah is otm, the douchiness of how the Thurston story came out at the time didn't cover him in glory and I think lol infidelity is reductive

re: Moore, it's the constant breaking of further promises after the affair came to light (fairly well documented in Kim's book) that kinda ruin it for me. I've ended up in the same place as sarahell, no particular condemnation, just loss of interest.

xxp Come on—I've said repeatedly here (and just above) that I'm not! What I'm saying is just the opposite—that that would be equally foolish.

The WHOLE POINT of this thread is personal feelings

this is one of those instances where there are probably at least half a dozen ilxors who do have "inside info" that is not available to everyone else, and it makes for awkward discussions because there is that unevenness.

idk this really isn't the thread to question "why" people come to these conclusions, it's more to discuss our personal listening choices? so splitting hairs about whether subjective dislike based on artists behavior is "justified" isn't really productive imo

yup, xp

i'm not going to c&p facebook threads where Kim's replacement said really wtf stupid things. ...but y'know, I can let everyone know that such threads exist and give myself some weird arbitrary power? ... idk, unless someone has some gossip-bomb to drop, we should move on to another instance

agreed, yeah, I'm sorry this is driving conversation more twd the specifics of a divorce. I was trying to say that my own feeling on the subject at hand is that I don't let what goes on between two people in a marriage color my opinion of either as artists or prevent my enjoyment...

I mean unless in this obv instance of abuse

in THE obvious instance

Lol that's very noble of u

Incidentally, I already thought Sonic Youth came across as absolute bellends in that Daniel Johnston documentary, so it's not like the Thurston stuff ruined some idealised image for me.

though if you want to post your inside information, you will definitely have an appreciative audience here on ilx!

people's reactions to the personal history of an artiste can often vary. I remember Mordy posting that Gogol was his all time fave writer despite him being a common garden variety anti-Semite of his era. I can't stand Laura Marling for the crime of being posh af and overrated, yet there are probably still loads of sex-offenders and nazis I still listen to. No point looking for sense or rationality in this game!

When I first saw this thread title a protracted discussion about Sonic Youth is absolutely the last thing I expected.

it was a pleasant respite from the expected discussion about Burzum and white supremacist metal bands that have taken place on dozens of threads already

also sleeve otm way upthread in re Sun City Girls

it’s definitely gotten harder for me to separate as I’ve gotten older. laugh and point but listening to someone who’s done bad shit sorta makes me feel like I’m betraying their victims in a way. same with artists who say heinous shit (in their art or otherwise), to the extent that popular figures can amplify and legitimize racist/sexist/ableist/hateful etc (sorry for shorthand) views.

I still listen to stuff made by people who did/said bad shit sometimes, though, can’t front.

One thing I try to keep in the back of my mind as I navigate my way through this subject (for the less egregious infractions, anyway): all of us are saying things right now that will be awkward in 10 years, unacceptable in 20, and beyond the pale in 50. I absolutely believe that.

Because Thurston hasn't been discussed enough?xps

I still read Ezra Pound and TSE, I still love Wagner's music, there's an obvious shameful pattern there, I hope I can see and counter-read the antisemitism, a lot of the current era indie era monsters have been easier to ignore cos I didn't care much in the first place. Maybe Morrissey is the closest to somoebody whose work I've valued in real time but is now far beyond the pale

Except for M Gira as I already said

I've said this before but the more righteous the artist appears the more we are invited not to separate the art from the artist but to conflate them - Springsteen probably the most obvious example here.

Never liked the Smiths but the sense of anger and betrayal at the way Morrissey tarnished his own image is in large part because he was on such a pedestal to begin with. Thurston Moore probably fits that pattern in a different way.

Unsurprisingly, the guy who coined the term "foxcore" is eventually problematic.

sad lol

“No I meant actual foxes.”

Jolylol

'problematic'

i'm genuinely surprised (and disappointed) to read the rod stewart quotes. i love his early music and had always vaguely thought of him as a decent guy -- which, i realize, had more to do with the persona i thought i heard in his music than anything i actually know about the real guy.

with lydon, i just try to think of the guy who was in the pistols and PiL as a different person than the guy we have now, tho i suspect he's been saying terrible shit for quite a while.

see for me the question here would be (like w/Siouxsie) "what does Stewart say/think about this now" - whether an artist is willing to grapple w/ their past behavior is key. like for sure Elvis Costello has jumped the shark as per ILM, but iirc he was very apologetic about his drunken racist tirade re: Ray Charles.

I've always accepted Costello's explanation as true--whether acceptable or not, that's going to vary from person to person--that he was in the presence of the kind of leftover '60s musicians he despised (Delaney Bramlett, I think, and a couple of others) and drunkenly wanted to offend them. Seems comparable, to a degree, to the Siouxsie Sioux thing. (Why he felt it was important to offend these musicians, that's another issue unto itself.)

I've also always used the Costello story as an example of how people can sometimes pay a heavy price for such things without necessitating direct punitive action (i.e., he wasn't dropped from his record label). For the next, I don't know, 10 or 15 years, he had to confront that story in virtually every story or interview I saw. It didn't go away for a long time--he could do an interview tomorrow and be asked about it.

I was just thinking of that again when Gary Peacock passed away.

Bowie bounced back pretty easily from his “I believe very strongly in fascism” / “Hitler was one of the first rock stars” phase. A weak mea culpa goes a long way

That's actually where White Riot starts, with Bowie and Clapton and Stewart. Bowie obviously made major amends with his MTV interview circa Thriller.

Insulated himself from a perception of racism, maybe... praising fascism obviously has other dimensions as well. His defense was that his observations were “glib” and “theatrical,” and that he’s actually “apolitical.”

did clapton ever apologize for his remarks?

He expressed disgust and shame over them: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-5261101/Eric-Clapton-72-confesses-shame-fascist-past.html

"he would often mix super-strength Carlsberg Special Brew lager with spirit vodka creating a strange brew to satisfy his insatiable thirst for alcohol"

Writer busy amusing himself there.

Listening to music I like by people who I suspect are kinda dumb makes me more self-conscious than listening to music by "unacceptable" people generally.

Brian Wilson, Edward Van Halen come to mind.

Maybe I'm just uncomfortable with music by savants from Los Angeles.

Like the first time I heard Panic by the Smiths and it got to the "hang the dj" part I thought he was being ironic, like "the music they play says nothing to me about my life" was meant to be comically self-absorbed. But then when he starts repeating the line "hang the dj" over and over and over, uhh...

Like for example joe meek murdered his landlady, was probably abusive to some of the young men he groomed to be pop stars. I'm fairly conscious of these things when I listen to joe meek and I feel like there's more to joe meek the person than just "landlady murderer". By which I do not mean "landlady murderer/troubled genius" to be clear.

Well, Brian Wilson actually co-wrote a song called "Guess I'm Dumb"

Bowie bounced back pretty easily from his “I believe very strongly in fascism” / “Hitler was one of the first rock stars” phase. A weak _mea culpa_ goes a long way

ground control to Major Tom
of fascism, there's nothing wrong

Well, Brian Wilson actually co-wrote a song called "Guess I'm Dumb"

― Lee626

I'm aware!

I mentioned Joe Meek because people were talking about how Phil Spector is an abusive murderer, but I think you can listen to his productions and not really be confronted with that, it's fairly standard teenage melodrama in a way. When you listen to joe meek you are confronted with his morbidity and his perviness and everything.

I do sometimes think people like Spector who everyone already knew was a deeply flawed person get off easier when they do something really awful than someone who manages to hide how despicable they are to the world at large, until after they bump someone off

i'm thinking of people like Cosby or OJ Simpson who (mostly successfully) fooled many of us into thinking they were affable and likable, whereas I wasn't shocked when I learned Phil Spector was charged with murder, and therefore my opinion of him had much less further to fall. (Joe Meek I'm not old enough to remember when it happened).

(i mangled that last post; 2nd and 3rd parts of sentence should be reversed)

Bowie did much worse than big up Hitler - ie the statutory rape of Lori Maddox and Sable Starr.

yes, and I don't care, this thread is not about that kind of gotcha BS but keep on being a terrible poster by all means

like, if that was your personal breaking point where you no longer listened to Bowie, talk about that, otherwise STFU

It's pretty germane given the talk of his "bouncing back" from fascism, but you know, go fuck yourself.

this is not a thread where we judge artists, dumbass

It is, though, a thread where discussion of what the wrongs they have committed and their responses and recoveries.

The relatively small amount of attention paid to the vast spectrum of rock stars of the '70s (in particular) who raped young women and how it hasn't affected the listening habits of most is pretty important to think and talk about when we're talking about, say, Elvis Costello's one racist rant from 50 years ago.

Because, yes, the sex crimes of Bowie and Iggy and fucking Tupac have been a factor in my listening habits, which I didn't think needed to be specifically stated in the context of making a post pointing out that Bowie was a rapist.

i feel like "dumb" is a bit needlessly harsh to describe brian wilson

the bowie/lori maddox thing has been called into question iirc

I mean, I think he's a little dopey. I was obsessed with evh at the age of 9 and thought he was cool. I was obsessed with BriWi at the age of 13 and did not think he was cool :)

I wonder if there are porno aficionados who will be discarding portions of their collections after the recent Ron Jeremy revelations.

He expressed disgust and shame over them: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-5261101/Eric-Clapton-72-confesses-shame-fascist-past.html🕸

i can't really take anybody seriously who says highly racist shit as a grown adult and then tries to walk it back later

I don’t know how much siouxsie “grappled” with her past behaviour tbh, she may have expressed some regret but she also quite clearly suggested the fact people were bothered at all was ridiculous pc gone mad

Like this is from 2005:

Siouxsie is surprisingly frank, if unrepentant.

"The culture around then," she explains, "it was Monty Python, Basil Fawlty, Freddie Starr, The Producers- 'Springtime For Hitler'." She kicks out her leg in a mock goosestep. "It was very much Salon Kitty. It was used as a glamour thing. And you know what?" she sighs." I have to be honest but I do like the Nazi uniform. I shouldn't say it but I think it's a very good-looking uniform."

You shouldn't say it for fear of upsetting the PC mob?

"Yeah. It's almost like you feel like saying,'Aw, come on. Nazis - they're brilliant.' Political correctness becomes imprisoning. It's very - what's the word? It's being very Nazi! It's ironic but this PC-ness is so fucking fascist. In America they're especially touchy about Nazis and it's so Nazi! You go to LA and it's so segregated. It's very Nazi and the irony is they don't get it. They don't realise how Nazi they are about taking offence to mentioning the word Nazi."

Slanted eyes meet a new sunrise
A race of bodies small in size

the embarrassed-about-that-stuff interview I remember is from a newspaper in the mid 90s, have not found it online.

Maybe she changed her mind again since

feel like at least if the odd artist would say "you know what? i'm really fucking stupid and ignorant" there'd be a bit more honest out there

That's p close to what Clapton said, ha.

I think it's time for another Morrissey/Siouxsie duet

i mean Clapton is one of those where it doesn't affect my more or less total lack of interest in him or stop me enjoying the odd track i do like if i hear it out somewhere

I asked Steve Severin about the Nazi paraphernalia when the Destroy art exhibit came here in 99 or so. I don't recall him being particularly regretful tbh. I recall he said something about using it against the National Front.

Severin!
Down on your bended knee!

There's an absolutely hair-raising story about John Martyn in Chris Frantz's autobiography just made me think, if this is true, fuck that guy forever.

Also, I thought it was Everett True who coined 'foxcore'

with right-wing stuff there's a kind of continuum from

apolitical < plays with stuff for shock value < political correctness gone mad < stereotyping ethnic groups < anti-immigrant < full-on racist

suppose you never know where someone is along that line until they tell you.

This is a subject that is almost impossible to discuss productively since a) literally everyone entering the debate has double standards (to people's credit, most are very much aware of this) and b) every counterexample or challenge by others can be casually dismissed as whataboutism. It's the same circular parade of worthy opinions and moral dilemmas in a never-ending carousel, the same examples are trotted out over and over again, no new insights are gained, just endless bickering, self-righteousness and (micro-)aggressions. Thirty years of online debate and nothing has changed. ILM is an amazing place, in the sense that this thread hasn't collapsed completely onto itself like it would have anywhere else, but it's already sparked a couple of irritated posts that make nobody happier or wiser.

But hey here's my personal code, which is as full of double standards and hypocrisy as anyone else's: I can accept a lot more shit from young artists caught up in blind enthusiasm for whatever they're into than from mature adults who should at some point know better, actions speak louder than words, words speak louder than projections, and private lives are none of anyone's business. I don't need public apologies or atonement from anyone for whatever they did or said in the past, those mean nothing, just stop doing dumb shit.

(apologies for the tone, not in a good mood today)

No worries, good post!

Yep, good post, Siegbran.

just stop doing dumb shit

yeah, this!

feel like at least if the odd artist would say "you know what? i'm really fucking stupid and ignorant" there'd be a bit more honest out there

― Mille scampeaux (Noodle Vague)

this too

love the truth bomb

xposts

Siegbran's code isn't too far from mine, insofar as how I judge the artist as a person, but I don't think my appreciation of the art is really impacted either way?

There's an absolutely hair-raising story about John Martyn in Chris Frantz's autobiography just made me think, if this is true, fuck that guy forever.

this is not meant as a gotcha but a ton of john martyn's already-known history gives one enough justification to never listen to any of his music again or ever. he sucked and it sucks bc i love his music so much

Male English musicians, stay away from beer and drugs, basically.

Also decent advice for those who are not male, English or musicians.

Why? I enjoy beer, can’t say it ever made me fancy fascism.

You say that now, but there's a reason it isn't called the Wine Hall Putsch.

I think the key implicit word is execessive, but fair enough.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86IpU3g-S8Q

I don’t know why it’s easier to forgive Bowie for espousing literal Fascism than to forgive others for being crypto-dog-whistle fascist, but it is.

Because he was just that more stylish while doing it, and his music was supposedly better.

*that much more

Avoiding substance abuse is a good idea, but I read Alfred's comment as pointing out that those guys have underlying attitudes which happen to come out when they're "under the influence" (or maybe not even). The point isn't to shift blame to overindulgence. I've never known anyone who's gotten drunk or high and said racist stuff.

Bowie having sex with/abusing/delete as you prefer children but not facing the same fall from grace as other figures is, to me at least, the strongest evidence of people now looking the other way because they like him so much, and include myself in that.

https://www.mic.com/articles/132399/the-complicated-sexual-history-of-david-bowie

It really does boil down to how much you love an artist's music. I find it easy to acknowledge these issues because I've never liked Bowie as much as everybody else (his best albums are 8/10s in my book).

Bowie having sex with/abusing/delete as you prefer children but not facing the same fall from grace as other figures is, to me at least, the strongest evidence of people now looking the other way because they like him so much, and include myself in that.

not just bowie, really basically any rock star from the era

Idk, are there any stories about David Gilmour or Peter Gabriel with underage groupies?

not just bowie, really basically any rock star from the era

I also have bad news for a decent # of you whose parents were hippies

It really does boil down to how much you love an artist's music. I find it easy to acknowledge these issues because I've never liked Bowie as much as everybody else (his best albums are 8/10s in my book).

yeah, that definitely is part of it! It is very convenient when the asshole artist in question is someone you dislike, don't know, or are neutral on. I like Bowie's music well enough, but I never had the same emotional connection to Bowie as I did to the Smiths or Joy Division.

(this isn't to diminish anything, to clarify; just that solely focusing on bowie is, itself, a way to avoid an actual reckoning)

I also have bad news for a decent # of you whose parents were hippies

I don’t think hippies were more likely to have anything resembling “rock star / groupie” encounters than anyone else

we'll have to agree to disagree on that one, though I'm merely speculating

Maybe some creepy “guru” types?

there was a fair amount of adult/child sex and related permissiveness in the 60s & 70s communes, speaking from direct personal experience.

(tbc I'm not trying to say that "everyone was doing it so it was fine" or anything of the sort)

Yeah - sleeve’s remark is pretty gross/disturbing, and not to get all “no true hippie” – but I assume that terrible people made their way into the scenes he’s talking about; as opposed to a “your parents” situation, as if being a hippie brought out the moral degenerate in an otherwise good person.

I think it's more that being a self-described left-wing feminist hippie in the 60s and 70s (and beyond) is in no way a guarantee that your actions weren't those of a criminal scumbag.

well not to sound overly sympathetic but when all you wanna do is *not* be like your parents and all the rules go out the window, it took people a while to figure out that that didn't mean "anything goes" was a better option. mostly I view my personal negative experiences as battle scars in the struggle to raise liberated children.

and sure, there were genuine bad actors as well, but some of this was open and "consensual" at the time, as ludicrous as that may seem from this removed perspective.

sleeve - thx for the elaboration, I appreciate your comments.

and fwiw (and as an xpost to pom) - I don’t think of hippies as being necessarily left-wing or feminist or “enlightened” in any particular way (in fact my impression is that traditional gender roles were often preserved; but I’m not speaking from direct experience).

I agree (hence the 'self-described').

And while I get where you're coming from, sleeve, 'at least their intentions were pure' is a debatable take. I'm perfectly willing to take the historical context into account, make no mistake about it, I'm just not convinced that overcompensation somehow makes it alright. If anything, it goes to show that knee-jerk opposition remains an extremely limited transformational strategy in some instances. I guess my motto throughout this entire thread is: 'people suck, even when they don't'.

But I don’t think many of them would have even described themselves that way. (Is this a US vs UK thing?)

Possibly? I'm pretty sure hippies were generally associated with left-wing politics in North America, but I'll defer to the experts on this.

xxp pom I don't think they knew what their intentions even were! everything was so reactive, it was all defined by what people *weren't*

and yes I was in a roomful of cheering hippies when Nixon resigned, definitely solid left

xpost They opposed the Vietnam War, but “left-wing politics”? No

(to sleeve - we may be working with different definitions of “left-wing” here! I thought Pom had something beyond being merely anti-Nixon in mind)

The hippies that I am familiar with were not political activists. Their lifestyle was the “movement”

nah I still know a fair number of these folks and they are active in local politics for the most part, anecdotal evidence but take it as you will

i'm not reading this whole thread so sorry if this was discussed but i was just thinking that separating the art from the artist is usually used in the context of a shitty person making good art. but i think it could be useful in the context of an average or decent or any non-shitty person making great art, who are then considered a great or smart or important or "good" person because of the great art they made. in that case it is good to separate the art from the artist and recognize that just because someone makes great music doesn't mean they're infallible or heroic or special

They weren't openly advocating for communism, no, but they were still more left-leaning than not. For instance, Wikipedia's article on the New Left includes hippies as a subcategory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left

But YMMV, I suppose.

xps

ew have we talked about Led Zeppelin yet? more terrible people that I still listen to and enjoy

Bowie's relative free pass is nothing compared to Prince, his at least is brought up

xxp yeah, we’re splitting hairs—but the (relatively brief) “Politics” section in the main Wikipedia entry for Hippie exemplifies what I’m talking about:

Politically motivated movements aided by hippies include the back to the land movement of the 1960s, cooperative business enterprises, alternative energy, the free press movement, and organic farming.

Fair enough. I guess my criteria are looser, for better or for worse.

re: the john lydon conversation earlier,an update

10 year old me is absolutely gutted that this is what his hero turned into. John Lydon, about as punk as a game of golf. Big fucking poser pic.twitter.com/2TUGKBKdoI

— Conor (@conorbrn) September 26, 2020

If a punk is an obnoxious narcissistic conman who peddles libertarian-esque values, there's no lack of consistency there.

Saw that earlier, bounced when the first reply I saw was about how a MAGA shirt was "more punk than a BLM shirt these days bro"

that picture is from a couple years ago i think? unfortunately lydon's been pretty consistently awful in his opinions for a long time.

Anarchy in the BK

When I saw PIL last year, he did not wear any MAGA apparel. I would say his stage attire was more... muumuu?

he's ancient but I wouldn't call him justified

the Lydon pic is from 2018, yes

I do feel for him a bit since I saw that article about how he's basically dropped out of everything to take care of his wife, who has Alzheimer's, full-time...can't be easy

Trump, too, dropped out of everything to take care of the US. They have so much in common.

nah I still know a fair number of these folks and they are active in local politics for the most part, anecdotal evidence but take it as you will

― sleeve, Monday, September 28, 2020 12:48 PM (five hours ago)

yeah, same here, my mom's sister was a Haight Ashbury Summer of Love participant and is the only member of my family (besides me) who was a Bernie supporter (at the age of 72), and used to do a lot of local activism mostly related to the environment and supporting low-income immigrants, and civil rights stuff in Latin America. I know a number of other "real hippies" and most are still pretty progressive, though some of them grew more libertarian as they aged, and others have become more centrist Democrat.

But back to music -- I was thinking earlier about a different issue than "when your fave musicians turn out to be assholes" -- and I'm sure we've discussed this elsewhere, but I definitely (like many people) have much stronger emotional ties to musicians I liked as a teenager vs. now as a middle-aged person, or even in my 30s. I'm guessing this is why we've talked a lot about Bowie and Prince and Thurston Moore and Rod Stewart and Siouxsie and Lydon, for example.

But my other issue is the music that provides comfort/reassurance or a perspective you can relate to that makes your feelings and emotions "okay" -- as in "you aren't crazy to feel/think this way" ... and then the artist goes off the deep-end mental health-wise. I vaguely remember having a conversation about this w/my cousin who has similar chronic mental health stuff as I do, but she's like 11 years younger. She was a big fan of Amy Winehouse, and then when Amy "did the things" it was like ... uh, maybe this music isn't reassuring? And I remember having the same feelings about Sinead O'Connor. Idk maybe this is "too girly" ?

girl it up, sara. this topic is meant for exploring perspectives.

i'm genuinely surprised (and disappointed) to read the rod stewart quotes. i love his early music and had always vaguely thought of him as a decent guy -- which, i realize, had more to do with the persona i thought i heard in his music than anything i actually know about the real guy.

Rod was last seen enthusiastically congratulating Boris Johnson on his thumping election win. I think we can say with some certainty that he is a bit of a gimp.

As for Thurston Moore, people can of course stop listening to Sonic Youth if they want (I never had much interest in them to begin with), but at the end of the day that is a private marital issue and ultimately none of anyone else's business.

so would you say then, that's a case where you are able to separate the art from the artist?

hahaha otm and in the spirit of the thread

sadly that's not the case for me, although I have actually been listening to/playing a TON of old SY cuz of those awesome Bandcamp compilations, I ain't got much time for Thurston's new stuff although it sounds like I would dig the longer pieces.

yes, and that's a clear distinction to draw here i think: there's a HUGE difference in just losing interest, while still being able to enjoy the old records. to use a current example: this is public enemy for me. there are fewer groups that had a bigger impact on me, but i've got zero interest in new material; and it's been that way for many years now. nothing against their new material at all, just doesn't do it for me.

forgot to add the most important part to that: in the same amount of time it took me to lose interest in their current output, the old records i have increasingly found more enjoyable than ever.

isn't not listening to Sonic Youth also erasing Kim's career too? her life's work as much as Thurston (as well as Steve and Lee)

feel like it's almost tacitly dissing her, as if it's "Thurston's band"

Siouxie, Lemmy, Lydon etc flashing Nazi insignia back in the day is not a "separating the Art from the Artist" situation. You might as well complain that the guy who played Herr Flick in Allo Allo should apologize. This is PERFORMANCE, on or
or off the stage, as they all made clear. Bad taste, yes, but that's no crime.

xpost to ums:

i will redirect your attention to one of my previous posts in here:

I consider myself the worst kind of cynic: I'm not surprised by the negative outcome, but nonetheless allow myself to be disappointed by it as if I were.

Never said I was smart.

everyone loses ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

isn't not listening to Sonic Youth also erasing Kim's career too? her life's work as much as Thurston (as well as Steve and Lee)

You could always try to filter out isolated bass tracks and listen to those.

Siouxie, Lemmy, Lydon etc flashing Nazi insignia back in the day is not a "separating the Art from the Artist" situation. You might as well complain that the guy who played Herr Flick in Allo Allo should apologize. This is PERFORMANCE, on or
or off the stage, as they all made clear. Bad taste, yes, but that's no crime.

Siouxie made clear, in that lengthy quote above, that she’s a total fucking idiot. I guess you could call that degree of ignorance “bad taste.”

Yes you certainly could. But she's neither a Nazi nor a Nazi apologist.

I think about this a lot. For me, it totally comes down to whether the offense pushes into my enjoyment of the art. I can't watch Bill Cosby because I think about him being a gross bastard. Same for Woody Allen.

I can't listen to Michael Jackson because I believe he's a straight up pedo. Can't listen to the Jackson 5 (who I LOVED) because I keep thinking about that sweet kid growing up to be a pedo and wondering why it happened like that.

Lou Reed was a jerk who hit women back in the day. He wrote a vile song called "I Wanna Be Black." However, I like that song although I have sense not to play it for anyone, ever. And I will never stop listening to the Velvets. But Chris Brown? Fuck that guy.

Gira/Swans is one that I really struggle with.

I don't expect artists to be good or nice people. I think a lot of them are probably assholes on some level. But when it colors the work and it keeps me from being able to experience it objectively, I'm out.

Yes you certainly could. But she's neither a Nazi nor a Nazi apologist.

Yeah, as per my contributions on the linked Twitter thread, I didn't mean to imply that Severin or Rotten were Nazis (and I like records by them), just that irresponsible edgelording wasn't beneath them (and I'm not sure what people were expecting from John Lydon politically).

I feel like Lemmy is getting close to being unfairly maligned here. Yeah, he collected Nazi stuff, and would happily tell interviewers that he did so because it was much cooler-looking than the other side's gear, but unlike Siouxsie or Sid (or Ron Asheton of the Stooges), he didn't wear it onstage. And it bears mentioning that while he had a reputation for sleeping with thousands of women over the course of Motörhead's career, unlike some of the other dudes who've been mentioned in this thread, there was never a single accusation (that I'm aware of) of assault or even ungentlemanly behavior from anyone. He seems to have actually...liked women. Not just as sex partners or drinking buddies, but collaborators. (He wrote and recorded songs with Girlschool, Lita Ford, Wendy O. Williams, Skin from Skunk Anansie, Jill Janus from Huntress, and probably others.)

I said Lemmy's Nazi stuff was a performance. Not that he hates women.

So many writers, artists and musicians I like seem to be not particularly nice people with not particularly nice views. I think the effect on one's appreciation of the art depends a lot on how close someone is to your era or age cohort. I can enjoy reading T.S. Eliot without worrying unduly about his antisemitism. Morrissey, on the other hand...

xp “everything” – Nazi imagery causes pain and offense that is not mitigated by “it’s just a performance, I’m not really a Nazi.” I just want you to understand that. (This is not so much about Lemmy and his “collection,” by the way, but some of the other examples.)

Morrissey is particularly terrible to me, his music was such a lifeline for people who felt different or ostracized and to then turn around and tell parts of that audience this is not for you is so cruel to me

xp that opinion is fair, but to me it comes across as historical revisionism, applying 2020 standards to the 70's is pointless

Lemmy et al and their Nazi stuff was all about publicly displaying unacceptableness. Causing pain and offense was the point. Btw Lemmy, Siouxie or Lydon could put any one of us in our place on this. Abusers like Rolf Harris, Prince, Jonathan King, Michael Jackson or the rest of them are a different thing.

xp I’m pretty sure it was painful & offensive in the ‘70s, too - as “everything’s” next post seems to affirm (but “everything” first said it was no different than portraying a German officer in a sitcom, now “everything” says pain & offense were intended, so I’m not sure what “everything’s” pov actually is).

Sorry you are confused. You should check out a film (or "movie") called The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle. It tries to explain this exact thing.

Epatering the bourgeoisie is often indistinguishable from just being an asshole

remember when the Pistols got that train robber guy to sing? what a weird deal

Top 10 single in the UK.

The song in question was called "Noone is Innocent". Think about that for a minute.

oh look it's everything

*thinks about it.*

Noone seems fine, but the rest of Herman's Hermits are still suspect

Saw him live a few years ago and half his set was familiar songs he didn't record like "Love Grows Where my Rosemary Grows", hoping nobody in the audience knew the difference. I couldn't listen to Hermans Hermits again after that. Asshole.

if I could only listen to music by artists whose worldview and beliefs align exactly with mine there would be very little left and I would drive myself crazy ensuring it was that way.

I love R Kelly as a singer and a songwriter but I haven't had the need to return to his music. I've been quite lucky in that my major worship-figures have so far been otherwise untainted.

I'm always weirded out when I'm in a bar or club and the DJ plays something by Michael Jackson or R Kelly etc. It seems so odd to me that you wouldn't just retire those songs and play different stuff.

there's a big difference with r kelly, who is still around and is using money from royalties to pay for lawyers and michael jackson who is very much not able to do that, so I wouldn't judge anyone else for playing mj the way I would probably with rk.

Yes, those MJ royalties are now spent on much worthier causes.

‘HBO shall not make any disparaging remarks concerning Performer or any of his representatives, agents, or business practices or do any act that may harm or disparage or cause to lower in esteem the reputation or public image of Performer,’ the lawsuit claims.

well yeah that's awful, as a general principle I think it stands though, you can't expect people to know about this stuff.

I'm always weirded out when I'm in a bar or club and the DJ plays something by Michael Jackson or R Kelly etc. It seems so odd to me that you wouldn't just retire those songs and play different stuff.

― boxedjoy, Tuesday, 29 September 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Tfw DJs can separate the art from the artist

so would you say then, that's a case where you are able to separate the art from the artist?

― Totally different head. Totally. (Austin), Tuesday, September 29, 2020 3:23 AM (nine hours ago)

Hahahaha excellent.

Best thread I've seen on here in a long time btw, loads of great contributions.

Here's a somewhat different scenario.

Seven years ago my favourite musician ended his life. For what it's worth, he wasn't the sort of artist who emanated a lot of self-destructiveness in his persona or biography before his death. I had seen him live and had a couple of interactions with him on his website.

I couldn't listen to his music at all for well over a year after his death. There was a posthumous album released three years ago that I still can't imagine listening to. His death is my main preoccupation when I listen to his older music now.

I know my disappointment comes from my belief that he was a partisan for life, especially at a time years ago when his music helped when I was very unhappy. I'm also disappointed in myself that I can't rise above this feeling to forgive the actions of someone who was suffering. At this point I have no idea what separating the art from the artist would entail.

Scott Miller, right? One of the greats, yeah. I only discovered him last year so I never had that feeling of loss, but I gather it's affected his fanbase (and family) really badly (as you'd imagine)

xp Not a music thing, but I may have been affected similarly by David Foster Wallace's death and a lot of the biographical details that came out around that time. As a young reader and a fan of Infinite Jest, I had it worked up in my mind that the book was the end result of hour after hour of fastidious research bolstered by some bottomless well of creativity and inspiration. And certainly those aspects are still there! But learning that a lot of it also came from his personal struggles with depression and substance abuse cast things in a much different light. I had assumed some sort of distinct separation between the art and the artist and that wall being knocked down makes it difficult to revisit his work.

...perspective you can relate to that makes your feelings and emotions "okay"... and then the artist goes off the deep-end mental health-wise.

This is such an interesting angle to bring into this discussion - the fear that if an artist you relate to goes there, it says something about yourself. Artists like Bowie or Gira or P-Orrige or Reed weren't creating relatable personas, at least not to me. But Cobain and Cornell had some great punchlines about what seemed like everyday depression, and I found it devastating that it didn't get them through more days.

Yes, those MJ royalties are now spent on much worthier causes.

Which sort of sideloads an issue - piracy and otherwise finding methods of listening that give no benefit to the artist (or estate).

if I could only listen to music by artists whose worldview and beliefs align exactly with mine there would be very little left

music is very rare. there really isn't that much music out there, and it is really really difficult to encourage people to write, perform, and record music.

ok, that was a mean post -- maybe you have an exceptionally detailed, exacting worldview and set of beliefs.

But for me, that argument feels specious given the immense quantity of music available to the public at little to no cost, even. Clearly the people making that argument have criteria other than:

1. music
2. made by unproblematic artists

I find it hard enough to agree with all my pals 100% of the time on everything, and they're my pals

and I don't think I'm a difficult person or anything but I can imagine that all my heroes and idols have a broad spectrum of opinions where, even if I did agree with them mostly on the big issues and persepctives, there might be divergences that feel ~problematic~

Yeah - that "argument" (if that's even what it was) feels uncontroversial to me(?) Very few of the artists I listen to probably share my exact politics (or whatever); and in these days of everyone posting their opinions, sometimes I need to remind myself not to get hung up on small differences.

xp I don't think anyone is arguing that you have to be 100% in sync with the artist -- geez -- like, of course, I am not in agreement with my pals 100% of the time. But these disagreements tend to be things that don't reveal my pals to be sociopaths or white supremacists.

sociopaths or white supremacists - of course not. I thought we were talking about minor differences.

(which can be magnified into a big deal in "online discourse" these days, and sometimes you need to step back from that.)

it's a sliding scale though isn't it - obviously none of my pals are Nazi mentalists or anything but sometimes you see an artist do something you don't think is worth being #cancelled over but you don't really appreciate either

I wonder whether being a musician makes it more or less difficult (on average) to draw this distinction. I've never made music and I barely know anyone in meatspace who does. Perhaps this has a bearing on my overwhelming sense that to listen to a piece of music is to interact with the artwork rather than its so-called creator.

I mean, there are obvious counter-examples in this very thread. I'm more interested in tendencies.

in terms of cancelling shitty humans from my music collection, i have to say for me it's pretty easy and quiet thing to do with very little need for moral debating... unless you have a major psychological attachment to a specific human (which is probably something you need to look into), there are very few artists who aren't easily replaceable with something with a similar vibe or feeling or quality... that ISN'T made by a complete prick/racist/rapist.

The Smiths were a major part of me growing up, and meant an awful lot to me, but when I can listen to The Sundays or Everything But The Girl or hell even Gene... do I really need to hang onto Your Arsenal?

there's such a vast quantity of incredible beautiful music out there that it's really easy to just reject the small amount made by shitheads. the fact that people have to jump through psychological hoops to still justify listening to Kanye or whoever when you have so many more options just really highlights their laziness/inability to expand themselves/weird attachment issues to egomanics?

the fact that people have to jump through psychological hoops to still justify listening to Kanye or whoever when you have so many more options just really highlights their laziness/inability to expand themselves/weird attachment issues to egomanics?

Yes, this is exactly what is happening here, thanks for the truth bomb.

There's sort of a matrix for me of (1) how bad is the "problematic" thing about the artist (2) how present is the problematic aspect in the art itself (3) how good/complex is the art otherwise.

I don't watch Woody Allen movies now because he and his "tendencies" or whatever you want to call them are so present in the movie, and that's true for me whether or not he literally raped a child (which I think he probably did but it's a strange fact pattern). I mean, Manhattan feels very much like a narcissist's view of a highly inappropriate (at best) adult's relationship with a high school girl and projects this false maturity onto Muriel Hemingway's character to absolve the protagonist, something that I admittedly didn't completely "get" about the movie until I was a certain age myself. And I don't think the film really shows full self-awareness about this. And I see a lot of stuff like that in a lot of his films. And I used to really, really like certain of his films (there was a time when I called Crimes & Misdemeanors my favorite film), so that doesn't come easily.

A very different example that comes to mind is Dirty Projectors -- when the 2017 s/t came out, there was a lot of noise about him being kind of gross about Amber Coffman and their breakup in the lyrics. Some of the lyrics were uncomfortable for me in that regard, but (1) many people become kind of shitty in their post breakup sorrows and go too far, and the stuff he said wasn't really *that* bad, (2) I didn't get this larger sense that he was some kind of gross or terrible person, and (3) I thought Keep Your Name had a lot of nuance to it beyond just the shitty parts and expressed some profound things about a relationship and breakup between two artists.

If it was just "DL being shitty to Amber" I might've kept my subscription to that band, but the fact that it was "DL being shitty to Amber, in rap" made me mute the band for a couple years

I almost spat coffee out onto my monitor, thanks fgti

also I will never stop laughing at how "I want to avoid music from abusive people/racists/homophobes/misogynists" is always immediately countered by the "how limiting for you, I guess you can't bear other perspectives", like "sometimes in my spare time I beat my girlfriend" or "but when you look at the banks, who is REALLY controlling the money" are perspectives I want to invite into my life

i know, i know, it's serious

xp lol

fwiw I wound up muting the band for a couple years too, but now when I go back to that album it doesn't bother me as much as it did, it just feels like a product of a bad time in a guy's life. And I like the new EPs a lot.

also I will never stop laughing at how "I want to avoid music from abusive people/racists/homophobes/misogynists" is always immediately countered by the "how limiting for you, I guess you can't bear other perspectives", like "sometimes in my spare time I beat my girlfriend" or "but when you look at the banks, who is REALLY controlling the money" are perspectives I want to invite into my life

― shout-out to his family (DJP), Tuesday, September 29, 2020 2:19 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

also this. "What, you can't handle the viewpoint race science could be true? So much for the tolerant left!"

It certainly happens, but has anyone pulled that move itt? As far as I can tell, the only perspectives duking it out here are 'you can't separate the art from the artist' vs 'you can'.

I did see everything posted

not totally the same thing, but I definitely have been severely castigated for posting something along the lines of "I find this song's point of view morally shitty and it also makes me feel bad to spend time with, so I would prefer not to do that"

Causing pain and offense was the point.

a distinction that should be made, I think, is starting to listen to new artists, vs. continuing; I'm probably not going to start watching a lot of Woody Allen movies for the first time, but if I'd already watched them, I can't unwatch them or undo any associations I may have made

katherine otm

The argument that good music is common and I can just replace the smiths with everybody but the girl feels like an intellectually dishonest argument towards a goal I think can be admirable (not letting your personal relationship with music overwrite your human relationships).

Great music is kind of rare and you can’t just overwrite one artist with another imo. The fact that it’s hard and may even be impossible to replace that space is something we should be honest about ... some artists really are singular

I am not cancelling Sonic Youth from my music collection or listening, or even the Thurston solo Psychic Hearts album ... but I am not going out of my way to listen to anything he's doing now. And no, he isn't "up there" with Morrissey or Mo Tucker but, just drawing the distinction between starting and continuing

The fact that it’s hard and may even be impossible to replace that space is something we should be honest about ... some artists really are singular

absolutely true. For some people it's like lovers or family ... but, y'know, sometimes you have to let go

ha I was wondering when Mo Tucker would come up, I can listen to everything through the 90's but I wouldn't really want to read an interview with her now... see also Exene

lol Exene -- who was responsible for the meme of the suburban Missouri couple with guns that was captioned as "X" ? I laughed.

Great music is kind of rare

It's not. There is more great music in the world than you could listen to in a hundred lifetimes. Most people just don't have enough time to hear enough stuff, though, so they grab onto the things that more or less fall into their laps. This is why people used to get so pissed about hearing music they didn't like on the radio - "This entertainment you are providing me for free is bad! I demand that you provide me with better entertainment for free!"

some artists really are singular

Yes, but that doesn't mean you can't listen to someone doing something completely different that you'll enjoy just as much as the thing you're not listening to. For example, if you decide you can no longer in good conscience listen to Kanye West, you could find yourself filling the Kanye West-shaped hole in your life with the music of Anna Thorvaldsdóttir. They do completely different things, but the amount of enjoyment you can derive from the one or the other is theoretically equal.

rofl @ that comparison.

Yeah - not everyone's tastes are as, um, broad as that (or could get there, even if they tried).

unperson is right, though. It could theoretically happen, like the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.

Some artists really are singular, but since there’s so much music, let’s listen to some artists who are similar but not as a) good and b) singular; or instead, let’s listen to a completely different artist who - although they may be singular in their field - don’t contain any of the characteristics that made that first artist singular and thus attractive to your taste

...and that's how Dangerous Toys got their first set of fans

If the point was to cause pain, fuck them forever. This is supposed to be a defense??

There is a difference between "I am using art to explore this terrible, painful thing" and "I am using this terrible, painful thing to create art" and I generally find the latter a lot lazier and more unsatisfying than the former

IOW I mostly agree with you but that doesn't mean anything is off-limits; it just means "pissing off the squares" is the most callow, facile, unoriginal, and morally bankrupt reason for taking up a topic

Yes but can you imagine what a loss for art GG Allin's nonexistence would have been?

it just means "pissing off the squares" is the most callow, facile, unoriginal, and morally bankrupt reason for taking up a topic

at this point in time, I agree. Historically, I disagree to some extent. But honestly, I feel like the impulse to say "Fuck you, Mom and Dad!" is eternal.

But, when you get to the point in life where you _are_ "Mom and Dad" -- it doesn't have the same appeal as when you are a teen/20-something

Sure, but if someone asks you "why?" and your answer is "because it's Mom and Dad", that is artistically unsatisfying. I've always felt that way; shocking just to be shocking is bullshit.

there are very few artists who aren't easily replaceable with something with a similar vibe or feeling or quality

This is a really weird take to me. I grew up with a friend whose family was heavily Christian and he wasn’t allowed to listen to any secular music. Because I guess there were a lot of kids like him, the Praise Music industry churned out non-secular analogs of popular bands like Green Day and Nirvana, a cheap Christian rock simulacrum for every successful grunge, metal and hip-hop group. Don’t know if this still happens.

The Sundays and EBtG, great as they are, don’t really sound anything like The Smiths. As for Gene, I’ve no doubt they would love to be compared to The Smiths but they also sound nothing like the genuine article as far as I’m concerned. Unfortunately, if you want to listen to The Smiths you just need to reckon with Moz’s increasing foolishness. I guess I don’t really see any music that I love as “easily replaceable,” which is why I love it in the first place. Our relationship to music sounds very different.

I almost posted a Gene song to that “Autumn Preserves” thread

Reductio ad absurdum = all art is disposable vs. other people don't really exist.

As many of us find both tough to swallow (maybe one more so than the other), we are where we are.

With people I interact with every day, on an intimately personal level in some cases, it takes me a really, really long time just to get a sense of what they're about. Those I am closest to, there's a lot more to them than I will ever get to know or see. Filling in my own blanks does everyone a disservice.

So it's really not that hard for me to dissociate from a 2D cardboard cutout of a person I only know through songs and press clippings, ultimately.

I guess I don’t really see any music that I love as “easily replaceable,” which is why I love it in the first place. Our relationship to music sounds very different.

― Paul Ponzi, Tuesday, September 29, 2020 4:21 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm

What if it's this:

https://www.newsounds.org/story/kind-blue-remade/

yeah that is totally antithetical to my listening experience as well

I wouldn't say any music or art is replaceable but there's effectively an infinite amount of it available and new work being released by the minute so there's a pretty high bar for me to feel real loss at avoiding work from a shitty person.

xp That however is HOT, and I think I am in the minority if readers who prefer Menard’s Quixote

I thought ILM user Jamie Summerz was the real author of the Quixote.

Besides, the work of art has long entered the age of mechanical reproduction.

One thing I will not brook is a knockoff Mark Kostabi

to be clear im not using the irreplaceability of artists as a defense of continuing to support those artists (wherever you draw those lines or what "support" does or doesnt mean). More that I think minimizing the stakes is kind of minimizing the art, like if it really didn't matter and all this stuff is interchangeable why do we even care ... if its not taking a pound of flesh then this entire thread is a waste of time

its not rare for me to like recognize that some art accomplishes something Important but its pretty rare for me to have a deep personal connection to a piece of magnificent art idk ... but i guess some ppl have more of a great librarian approach to it or something

No, I thought that was clear from your follow up and it’s a good reminder that the reason this whole topic is a hot button in the first place is because the art we imprint upon is so important to us and it’s sometimes difficult when the actions of the artist change the meaning of the art to us, which also changes a bit of our self-conception.

My list, on a scale from "I can't anymore" to "I can":

Mark Kozalek / Red House Painters / Sun Kil Moon - The major focal point of his music is his persona, and his persona turned out to be pretty dickish. Used to love some of his albums, but have completely written him off.
Morrissey / The Smiths - This one hurts the most... I had a really personal high-school-bonding attachment to Smiths, but I can't bring myself to play any of those albums anymore. All those great Johnny Marr riffs are just collateral damage here.
Kanye - I can still enjoy the pre-meltdown stuff if it comes on, but I've got no interest in checking out any new stuff. I rationalize that there's some kind of split personality, and I'm into Jeckyll but not Hyde.
Smashing Pumpkins - I went off SP in a big way when Billy first went all Infowars, but the rampant fandom on ILM has actually reconciled me to their first 3 albums again.
Sonic Youth - they were more fun to listen to when Thurston and Kim were still a couple, but I don't actively avoid their music or anything.
Michael Jackson - Maybe it's because he's been dead so long, but I do a pretty good job separating art and artist here.
Grimes - Every time I think I'm out, she pulls me back in.
Real Estate - the guitarist got cancelled pretty publicly, but they fired him right away, so in the end it was just a blip in my fandom.
Bowie - I haven't read much about his bad behavior apart from this thread, and I'm going to avoid doing so, so that it doesn't ruin my enjoyment of Hunky Dory
Miles Davis - it's so much easier to dissociate the art and the artist when it's instrumental

Would be nice if they stripped Morrisey's voice from the Smiths records and replaced him with the gals from Brasil 66. With different lyrics of course.

Marr does okay singing some of those songs live.

I would go see Marr sing

I will always love "Panic" and "Ask" and am keeping those records. will I ever buy another Smiths record new? of course not. would I buy one used? only if it's a screaming deal, and if it's one I don't have and actually want.

it would be poetic justice if they went back and replaced morrissey's voice with sandie shaw's

Kanye - I can still enjoy the pre-meltdown stuff if it comes on

Kanye's lyrics have been repugnant since at least 2003

Wait, what the fug has Brendan McCarthy done?!

― OrificeMax (Old Lunch), Saturday, September 26, 2020 6:36 AM (four days ago)

wondering tonight if there's any comic, record, film or sitcom it'd be harder to go back to & enjoy than Pip & Norton

This is a really interesting thread.

I think it's all too easy for one person to criticise another who has trouble reconciling the fact their favourite artist is now problematic.

"Listen to something else, there's lots more out there" isn't a satisfactory answer, perhaps even condescending if the listener considers that artist and their music an intrinsic and inseparable part of their life:
They got the cassette on their sixth birthday, modelled themselves on their persona, used their lyrics as life guidance, the music got them through their darkest nights and their happiest days - an artist can have a major impact on someone's whole outlook in that respect, and for someone who's not really a fan to add salt to the wound by saying "Get over it and listen to someone else", well it's like asking someone to erase a part of themselves. It's not always that easy - especially if the marketed version of an artist which the listener has bought into turns out to be quite different from the reality.

That's not to excuse the behaviour of bad people, or to say we should continue to endorse problematic artists. There are plenty of artists who I just can't bring myself to listen to any more.

But it tends to be easier with acts I came to in more recent years, fell in love with, but then found to be tarnished. Swans is one: I came to them late with The Seer, which I still think is awesome but just can't enjoy since the rape allegations against Gira (which seem to have dissipated now? what happened?).

On another level, at the height of a two year infatuation with XTC, Andy Partridge, who I was proclaiming as an utter genius of songwriting, started tweeting out some low-key conspiratorial antisemitic crap, and now I can't take his music as seriously as I once did.

Perhaps it's privileged of me to say so but I have to admit, I miss the days when every celebrity's every brainfart wasn't on display for the world to see 24 hours a day. Frankly, I feel I'm better off not knowing a musician's political nuances or getting enveloped in the shitstorm that inevitably follows, but unfortunately this is how it now works.

Separating the art from the artist is a lot more difficult these days. JK Rowling is a fiction author, but also a high profile Twitter personality and now she's a TERF.

Thankfully I'm not enough of a stan of her work to have to reconcile this, but if I were, I could imagine this to be more than heartbreaking: It would be like having many aspects of your childhood and possibly your adulthood destroyed.

To denounce the work that you love so much based on the artist's political views is a choice that a lot of people are having to make. Those who choose to, I would say are extremely brave, but I would 100% understand if they chose to continue enjoying the work while denouncing the artist.

Someone I know, now in their late 20s, was a devoted and passionate fan of both Lostprophets and JK Rowling in their teens. They were devastated by the Ian Watkins revelations - and having spent most of their working life involved with LGBTQ+ equality, they're now angry and heartbroken about JKR's stance on trans issues, and have posted publicly that they will no longer engage in any activity which generates profit for JKR.

None of these are particularly new dilemmas really - music journo avant-la-lettre Nietzsche wrote books and essays on his disillusionment that his longtime hero Wagner turned out to be an antisemitic nationalist blowhard, and he could no longer enjoy his music.

"Listen to something else, there's lots more out there" isn't a satisfactory answer, perhaps even condescending

― Specific Ocean Blue (dog latin)

For better or worse, this is the mechanism behind this whole parallel universe of Christian music: "Do those drug taking, free loving satan worshippers deeply offend you? Here's Stryper, and they rock just has hard!".

Long thread, and I have skimmed bits of it, but I think Dog Latin touches on something quite important, here!

(But the problem is, the point he touches on is usually the place where these kinds of threads start to go wrong. That "Am I a bad person for loving X, if X is a racist/rapist/something really bad?" is the wrong question to be asking and leads to bad faith discussions; the more important question to ask is "How do we re-evaluate the legacy of X, in a way that acknowledges the harm and is repairative towards the people *affected* by that harm?" A much harder question but far more useful.)

But this is where the separation becomes hard - yes, there is an almost endless and inexhaustible supply of amazing music to discover and become captivated by. But we only get one life, and we have a limited supply of Formative Experiences and First Times within that life. If one is obsessed with and captivated by music, then the music that was important to us, while we were having our formative experiences becomes super-charged with emotion, that is as much about us and our 'first times' - and we don't pick music at random, we pick music that communicates something important to us. And it's pretty natural to interpret the *source* of that communication that means so much to us at emotionally charged moments, as coming *from* the musicians that made it. (This isn't always the case - but it's a very natural and understandable assumption to make.)

Horrific actions by musicians who made music that expressed so much to us - well, they *do* taint our memories of, and associations with our own formative moments. And the dilemma becomes, either to deny the badness (easy but bad reaction) or allow one's formational moments to be tainted (difficult and painful reaction).

My own personal story of this: discovering that the man who was responsible for my own sexual awakening which I've talked about before on this forum (this may seem shallow, but I think when you're queer, sexual awakenings take on even *more* importance - this man was not just my first understanding that I might *not* be a lesbian, which everyone including myself had just assumed I was; but my first inkling that my desire for him was not just to do with wanting him, but desiring a male body, in terms of wanting to *be* it, to *have* that body as much as fuck it) - was a repeated, serial assaulter of women, not just in terms of using violence to coerce women who didn't want to have sex with him; but using sexual violence to humiliate and violate women who *had* consented to have sex with him. To hear it once was a shock, but to hear multiple, repeated stories, from different women on different continents, with undeniable similarities that were too consistent to be untrue - that was gut-wrenching and stomach-churning.

What am I supposed to do with that? It's one thing to say, 'fuck this guy' and stop listening to his music, stop buying his work or supporting him in any way, and choose different music that does the same thing. But I can't go back and relive my teenage experiences, and retroactively have a different sexual awakening, from a guy who wasn't a serial sexual assaulter? (I *can* retroactively claim a different trans root, but... it's complicated.)

What I can do is, not *deny* that those assaults happened to those women, try to affirm their experiences - it's hard when there's about a 5 minute window of 'fuck this guy' then it goes back to this omerta of silence, where people just stop talking about it. When really, you want the aftermath for the assaulter to last as long as the aftermath of rape or assault does for women - like, what would be Just? Would it make things better, if for the rest of time, people could not mention his name in public without going, like "Pop Star X, serial sexual assaulter"? What would that accomplish?

I don't think it's a simple matter. And I also don't think self-flagelation of 'what does it say about me, that I still like this stuff!??!?' helps. But I'm trying to interrogate and honour why people *do* feel the need to do that.

And in terms of not judging the past by the standards of the present...

(specifically, talking about the weird time period between the Sexual Revolution - usually pinpointed as being between the invention of the birth control pill and the advent of AIDS - where, during the 60s and 70s, attitudes towards sex got really *weird* in ways that were legible neither to the previous, more puritanical periods, nor the later era either.)

You cannot judge the past by the standards of the present. But you *can* judge the past by the standards of the past!

non-musical examples: 1) by present-day standards, Frederick the Great was a vicious, vitriolic antisemite, but by the standards of 18th Century Prussia, he was notably tolerant and an advocate of religious freedom. Both these things can be true. 2) Even by the standards of early 20th Century America (which were pretty racist at the time), HP Lovecraft was notably, exaggeratedly, disproportionately racist, like, this was his entire schtick - the man invented race-horror. You *can* judge the past by the standards of the past.

That it is possible, to look at contemporary accounts - that even back in the 60s, which were far more misogynist times than today - people *at the time* described the behaviour of people like John Lennon and Brian Jones towards their mistreated partners as being shocking, offensive, notably out-of-step. (And Brian Jones is someone who is kind of like 'my Prince' in terms of someone I had to let go of, because despite being intriguingly interesting in terms of gender ambiguity and gender play - but there was a point where I could no longer ignore the violence and coerciveness and abuse towards multiple women. Where I had to say, 'I can't, with this guy, any more.')

And deeply uncomfortable stuff like... teenage sex. This is stuff that is so hard for me to talk about, on a personal level (and also very open to misunderstanding!) It's shocking to me, to go back and read ~radical feminism~ from the late 60s/early 70s, and see people like Shulamith Firestone advocating for the right of teenage girls to have sexual desires and sexual encounters with adults, even though she is advocating it from a position of advocating *for* women and claiming sexual desire as a form of empowerment, which was genuinely radical AT THE TIME. But that is the environment within which one has to *read* stories like Lori Mattix. And understanding that the way that Mattix describes her encounter with Bowie - that it was driven by the girls, that it was about the desire of her and Sable Starr - differs from the way that both she and Pamela Des Barres describe their relationships with Jimmy Page - that Page was coercive, controlling, that he had a complete double standard around 'sexual freedom is fine for Jimmy; it is totally unacceptable for the girls who will be locked in his hotel room'. And that Page had and continues to have a specific predilection for much younger partners which *does* speak to a worrying power disparity - while Bowie was far more egalitarian, both in terms of, during the Sexual Revolution, his wife *was* allowed the same sexual freedom he was; and also that he didn't have a pattern of prefering much younger partners, he had partners the same age, even older, and was pretty open-ended, rather than following a fetish or coercive power thing. That they aren't just ~all the same thing~ - and I'm not arguing that 'oh, this bad thing isn't bad' - what I'm arguing is that it is possible to make moral judgements that take into account the situational and cultural currents of the time. That to me, being both someone who has intensively studied the moral climate of the sexual revolution, and being someone *who was once a teenage girl*, I do think it's possible for me to personally draw a line that says "Bowie's sexuality was kind of a big grey area, while Page was unquestionably shitty, even by the standards of his own time." And that goes beyond whether I liked Bowie or Zeppelin more or less, or had any kind of personal feelings about their music's formative effects on me.

(I loved both of them, at different stages of my life. I persist with Bowie, I do not persist with Zeppelin, for more reasons than just the sexual politics.)

This process does force "the fan" to let go of the idealized projected image he/she may have cherished of a celebrity/hero over a longer period, it's really not that different from dealing with idealized relationships with parents or longtime friends that either get a sordid past exposed, or change over time under the influence of their experiences, company, mental state, etc. If I was a lazy amateur psychologist I'd probably bring up that old chestnut the five stages of grief - but apparently that doesn't exist.

For random dilettantes who are not interested in the artist/music/scene it's easy to quickly flip the binary from indifference to negativity when some personal threshold has been crossed ("artist seems well respected, not a fan tho" / "fuck this, will never listen/support"), but that is an easy process from the luxury of distance.

Morrissey is particularly terrible to me, his music was such a lifeline for people who felt different or ostracized and to then turn around and tell parts of that audience this is not for you is so cruel to me

But I mean, Smiths songs were never "Beautiful" by Christina Aguilera. They're p much all written from a pov of self-pitying misanthropy; I like them because they hold a mirror to my dark side. Even the context of "it's so easy to laugh, so easy to hate/It takes guts to be gentle and kind" is a song where he laughs at people he hates while remaining miserable himself.

It's less "this is a universal call for people to be good to each other, how disappointing" and more "I thought I'd found my tribe of misfits until the leader said 'get that nigger out of here'"

xp I’m not sure you understood The Smiths

Oh, yeah, I mean, hearing "Bengali" did hurt tbc.xp

But if I was able to reconcile it as an ugly manifestation of the same attitudes I was getting from his other songs, realize that my identification with the persona was my own projection (and still listen to the Smiths), I'm not sure I was misunderstanding.

Even the context of "it's so easy to laugh, so easy to hate/It takes guts to be gentle and kind" is a song where he laughs at people he hates while remaining miserable himself.

― The nexus of the crisis and the origin of storms (Sund4r), Wednesday, September 30, 2020 1:25 PM (twenty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

huh we have way different interpretations of that song

How do you hear it? I'm pretty sure a deep dive into "I Know It's Over" will be the more illuminating discussion for me.

I hear that as a song about a miserable person in the process of killing himself while enumerating all of the ways in which he is worthless

No need for a discussion, Genius has got you covered:

The speaker is now lamenting over the fact that the hardest accomplishments in life are the virtuous ones. He finds it easy to mock and despise others in his mind, but does not have the guts to truly be a virtuous man, thus affecting his ability to hold on to and cherish his lover.

https://genius.com/The-smiths-i-know-its-over-lyrics

i guess i took the it's so easy to laugh, etc as the protagonist trying not to fall into hatred for his unrequited love (who chose the loud loutish lover)?

If he's singing to the bride, she picked two separate guys over him

Some of the points made above are sort of related to the point about punks wielding swastikas and other Nazi imagery for "shock value." Punks are supposed to be allied w/the marginalized, out-groups, etc. - but if you belong to a group that was victimized by the Nazis, you do not feel like these artists have you in their corner. In fact, there is not really a difference from a "real" fascist who "means it," with respect to their choice to victimize you for art/agitprop.

Yeah, those lines are a little ambiguous but "handsome groom, give her room/Loud, loutish lover, treat her kindly/Though she needs you more than she loves you" seems p clearly like bitter contempt and mockery to me. "So easy to laugh..." could be a callback to this (struggling against his own tendency to laugh and hate) or a rebuttal to the bride's (imagined?) taunts, which immediately precede those lines but they are also repeatedly interspersed with "over, over, over", which seems like another point of tension against the idea of having strength or having guts. It's an emotionally complex song, to be sure. I had just meant that the way in which it was a lifeline for people was in examining one's own darkness.xp

The line about the lover is bitter but... I don't see anything mocking in it? And the line about the groom is neither (to me)?

Well, the alliteration of "loud, loutish lover" is at the least playful in its insult. If the groom and lover are the same person, he is undercutting "handsome" with "loud, loutish" and "groom" with "lover". If they are two different guys, "give her room" seems a little sarcastic, in that the reason she needs space is bc she has a lover on the side.

(on my own track here)

I think it's remarkable to read the 1980 Bowie interview where he explains away his fascist phase. Suddenly, I was in a situation where I was meeting young people of my age whose fathers had actually been SS men. That was a good way to be woken up out of that particular dilemma... I imagine it's how it actually went down, but what a thing to say -- that he snapped out of it meeting the children of Nazis, of all things. Victims are just totally erased in his reckoning.

Btw, he then goes on to immediately shit on L.A. (And Los Angeles, that's where it all happened. The fucking place should be wiped from the face of the earth)... shades of Siouxsie Sioux. Don't know what it is about L.A. that is so triggering to these particular artists.

British people hate the sun

Not quite true. Living in the UK for a year and a half made me like 'Here Comes the Sun'.

I went for one little walk on the beach in Santa Monica, I came home 20 minutes later the colour of a roast tomato.

It's not that Britishes hate the sun, it's that the sun hates *us*!

sorry pom, it's been declared, by previous rulings, we all have to share nothing but taunting sun images in Britishes threads

xpost

Dave Gahan (and, um, Morrisey) seem to like it here.

This is reminding me of a book I read somewhere around 30 years ago called Los Angeles Without a Map, wherein the British narrator posits a theory that a sizable number of the best looking people in America moved to Los Angeles in the early 20th century to make it in the movie business, and when they got there they hooked up and married each other and had kids, and that's why white people from Los Angeles are the Master Race. Even 30 years ago, it read just as bizarre as that seems now.

oh cool, So Not Gonna Happen: The Book

plenty of brits definitely like the sun/Los Angeles. myself for instance. or fascist bastard Morrissey as mentioned itt

or this spry 80-year-old:

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/07/07/20/30500688-8499523-image-a-46_1594151212527.jpg

doesn’t every superstar boomer british rocker have a home in LA?

I think most celebrities of the western world do, tbh

Modest Mouse was a band whose music I loved in high school and I never really cared for the people behind the music, never really read interviews or even knew what the bandmembers looked like. Nowadays I’m aware Isaac Brock is an asshole and a creep.

That said several of their songs bring me back to a couple years in my life that I have no problem removing the artist from the music, because as I’ve said, I wasn’t particularly interested in the people behind the music even then.

Oh yeah, I mean, a lot of the artists I listen to, especially current artists and artists who only came to my attention through reissues etc- I wouldn't recognize if they passed me on the street. I know absolutely nothing of their biographical details. They're effectively anonymous.

There have always been loads of artists I have read about and see photos of, but have no idea what they sound like. Even if their music is familiar and I hear it at the supermarket or w/e every day, I wouldn't associate it with the person.

I wonder if I've unconsciously become mistrustful of the more personality-driven music and artists. If so, that's a real shame.

If so, that's a real shame.

Quite the opposite imo.

I’m actually kinda mistrustful of people who are that incurious about the minds and interior lives of the people who created the music you hear?

Like, what even *is* music to you, if you don’t hear it as a communication of another mind, another soul, direct to your emotions? Do you just experience music as passages of disconnected... notes? With no connection to another human who made them?

I guess that’s a topic for another thread...

Xp idk. However you feel about MJ, MJ is the blueprint for so much stuff atm and his material was full of this insane psychodrama, pathologies on display... If there are people doing that as well now, and especially if that's where the moment is, I'm sorry to be missing out.

Like, what even *is* music to you, if you don’t hear it as a communication of another mind, another soul, direct to your emotions? Do you just experience music as passages of disconnected... notes? With no connection to another human who made them?

Think of it this way: music is a third party with a mind of its own.

the notes are connected with each other

like, what even *is* music to you, if you don’t hear it as a communication of another mind, another soul, direct to your emotions? Do you just experience music as passages of disconnected... notes?

I probably gravitate more to artists who prioritize form, tbh?

This is something I've tried to self-diagnose here ("other ppl don't really exist"). With the really personality-driven stuff, they're something like character actors and I'm filling in the blanks.

I like pomenitul's answer way more than mine anyway

Like, what even *is* music to you, if you don’t hear it as a communication of another mind, another soul, direct to your emotions? Do you just experience music as passages of disconnected... notes? With no connection to another human who made them?

...Yes?

Music is not a musician's diary. At least, not the music I listen to. It is organized sound. The reasons behind its creator's choice of sounds, and organizational methodologies, may be interesting fodder for discussion if I get the chance to interview them, but I do not see them — or the music as a whole — as a message directly to me, because I'm not Mark David Chapman. Nor do they particularly impact what I get out of the music, which is a simple question of "do I find this pattern of sounds beautiful y/n". Substitute other positive assessments ("exciting," "pleasing") for "beautiful" as necessary.

Yes, I understand that this way of listening "works" "better" for instrumental music than for pop songs, but I don't listen to pop music anymore (and frankly I kind of distrust people my age who do). As I've said ad nauseam, when I listen to music with words at all, I mostly ignore them. For me, it's about the sounds (the sound of a trumpet, an upright bass, a grand piano, a string quartet, a synth), the same way looking at an abstract painting is about the colors and shapes and the size of the canvas and where it's hanging in the room. In fact, I've frequently asked jazz musicians who give their compositions polemical titles what the value is in that gesture, because it's instrumental music, so a piece called "I Hate Donald Trump So Very Very Much" could quite easily be some listener's fuck-soundtrack, or the lullaby they play for their kid at night. Music is organized sound. Isn't that enough? Why does it need to be more?

It is enough for the genres we care about. Not so much for pop (in the broadest possible sense of the term), which has always been about infinitely more than 'just' the music. I think of pop as a Gesamtkunstwerk of sorts: you've got the music qua music, sure, but it's supplemented by a strong visual identity and a theatrical narrative on top of its systematic reliance on vocals and hence lyrics.

Anyway, our respective answers to Austin's original question are very much predicated on the types of music we favour in the first place.

frankly I kind of distrust people my age who do

I'll bite here... why?

Fwiw I do think something of the composer/musician is 'communicated' unto the work, but what the work makes of those intentions, no matter how heartfelt, is never a 1-to-1 translation, precisely because the work has a strange will of its own. This is why shamanistic conceptions of art have always fascinated me: the artist is (mainly) a vessel for something that is beyond them, something inhuman, which I suppose used to be called 'God' or 'the divine' or 'spirit' or whatever. I don't believe in any of this but what I listen for most of the time is a detheologized version of that. So no, I don't give a shit about the artist's ego – my teens are long past me and there are infinitely more interesting things to pay attention to imo.

When I was growing up, I had access to a lot more music writing than to actual music. So there was a time when I knew EVERYTHING about, say, The Doors, but had never actually heard them. I knew song titles, even words and chords in some cases, and had an idea of how it might sound.

It was really easy to get pretty invested in an artist that way. You don't even need the music really, in some cases it was more rewarding without it.

Hopefully we've broadened the discussion to include artists who are not problematic/shitty people/etc at this point.

Like both these last two posts

Hearing all that stuff for the first time was just like meeting someone IRL who you've corresponded with online for years.
Never quite what you expected.

Sometimes not even close.

Did any of these albums you only knew of through hearsay exceed your expectations?

This is why shamanistic conceptions of art have always fascinated me: the artist is (mainly) a vessel for something that is beyond them, something inhuman, which I suppose used to be called 'God' or 'the divine' or 'spirit' or whatever. I don't believe in any of this but what I listen for most of the time is a detheologized version of that. So no, I don't give a shit about the artist's ego – my teens are long past me and there are infinitely more interesting things to pay attention to imo.

Van Morrison is a great example of this...what does Astral Weeks, the lightness, the joy, the beauty of that have to do with the irritable, constipated shithead who made it? I have no idea, I've certainly never read anything where Van seems to have much insight into his own music....

Was reading something about Neil Young where, in the 70s when he was writing songs as such a great clip, he used to leave to go in his room and say "Time to turn on the faucet" and come back with a song an hour later

This is why shamanistic conceptions of art have always fascinated me: the artist is (mainly) a vessel for something that is beyond them, something inhuman, which I suppose used to be called 'God' or 'the divine' or 'spirit' or whatever. I don't believe in any of this but what I listen for most of the time is a detheologized version of that.

I was trying to figure out how to say something similar. I don't believe in anything but sometimes I listen to Exile on Main Street and think, "Wow, what odd choices the gods make when they decide who to speak through." And tbh that disconnect - Jagger the preening narcissist vs. Jagger who wrote "Let it Loose" - is one of the things I value about the music, it makes it all seem more magical.

Whoops, meant to italicize the quote.

Kipling - another artist I have very intense and mixed feelings about - liked to say, "We are only telephone wires." Also liked to talk about his Daemon - sometimes it was with him, sometimes not. There are certainly artists where I don't like them as people but I do like their daemon.

Dylan - “...it’s not me. It’s the songs. I’m just the postman; I deliver the songs”

I've always loved this reply of Samuel Beckett's to an academic critic who was studying his work:

So have nothing wherewith either to agree or disagree with what you say about my work, with which my unique relation – and it a tenuous one – is the making relation. I am with it a little in the dark and fumbling of making, as long as that lasts, then no more. I have no light to throw on it myself and it seems a stranger in the light that others throw.

Artist say stuff like that; but I don’t read interviews with, say, Dylan hoping to gain insight into his work. I read them because he’s an interesting dude.

Did any of these albums you only knew of through hearsay exceed your expectations?

― pomenitul, Thursday, October 1, 2020 5:38 PM (twelve minutes ago)

Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd is the really obvious one. Confounded my expectations briefly, and quickly exceeded them.

He was my "hero" for a long time... Thought about Sarahell's post, re: the moment of horror that occurred when I realized "oh fuck, this is what I'm actually turning into" lol. Not at all scary.

The artist as conduit thing makes a lot more sense for some artists than others, but you've already acknowledged that I suppose...

Funny you should say that! I was really taken aback when I first heard Piper because it sounded (almost) nothing like the Gilmour-era Floyd I knew and loved. At first I quibbled with the retrospective hype then I totally embraced their early sound and now I love both because PINK FLOYD RULES.

Hard agree.
I do kind of think less of Syd for making 'Fart Enjoy' :)

Tbf Mozart wrote a canon titled 'Lick me in the ass', so Syd is forgiven.

GG Mozart

When I was growing up, I had access to a lot more music writing than to actual music.

It was really easy to get pretty invested in an artist that way. You don't even need the music really, in some cases it was more rewarding without it.

This perfectly describes my elementary school KISS fandom. When I first heard their music it was soooo underwhelming.

(cases where you can separate the art *and* artist from the awesome costumes)

YES. I had cool uncles who had KISS albums. They wouldn’t play their records for me and would get pissy if they caught me messing with them. But I would sneak in and stare at those album covers. Years later I finally heard them and I have never been more underwhelmed.

I was being only partly facetious in my question, so I'm really glad that people have engaged with it.

There's a long tradition within music geek fanboy culture, to be dismissive of any approach to fandom that *does* focus on personal expression, or expression of personality through music - that this is shallow, inauthentic, it's ~what girls do~ at best reading, or it's *inherently* ~Mark David Chapman~ at worst (rather than Chapman being an extreme and abberrant case of what happens when that style of fandom goes too far).

But suggesting that there exist at the opposite extreme - and this is a personal pattern I've noticed, in my own interactions with music fans, NOT a proscriptive 'all people who care about form rather than personality are unfeeling psychopaths with no empathy' - but a tendency for people who take an extreme view of music as a *thing* (rather than - as all artforms are - a form of communication) - to similarly view other people in their lives: friends, partners, colleagues - as things because they never learned to *care* about the interior lives of other people. This is also a thing, that happens at the extreme end of 'only form matters' fandom.

It's not 'one style of fandom is good and right, and the other is bad and wrong' - it's that there are distinct pitfalls to *each* style of fandom and it's important to recognise both of them.

Anyway, our respective answers to Austin's original question are very much predicated on the types of music we favour in the first place.

Like, this isn't true at all, because people on this thread are having very different reactions to *exactly the same music* - most notably in people talking about their differing feelings on the specific example of Sonic Youth? How is Sonic Youth, just one band, 'different types of music'?

I think that understanding that there *are* different styles of fandom (and, indeed, one person can engage different modes of fandom at different stages, or with different artists) is key to understanding how it is easy for some people to 'separate the art from the artist' and how it is incredibly difficult for others.

The question at the heart of this thread is, as always, how do you deal with the fact that absolutely horrible and destructive people can make incredibly worthwhile, beautiful and moving art?

The answer to that isn't just 'what do we do with horrible people' or even 'what type of art makes it easy to ignore horribleness' - it also gets into 'how do people conceive of what art even *is* and where it comes from?'

The 'shamanistic' approach to understanding music-making - this idea that music is just ~out there~ on a universal radio, and some people (musicians, songwriters) are just very sensitive at picking it up - it's a seductive idea, because it allows us as listeners to bypass the 'horrible people' part of the equation. And it is also how music-making can often *feel* like from the inside - I say this as someone who wrote songs, some of which were played on the radio and people seemed to like and all - and I understand what artists mean, when they say that you don't write music, you channel it, it doesn't come from *you*, it comes from ~The Muse~ or whatever. The best music I ever wrote didn't come from my conscious mind, it came from ~somewhere else~ - and this is a very, very common experience for songwriters to describe.

But that question of 'well, where does it come from, then?' remains open - does it come from the artist's own ~Freudian Subconscious~ or some kind of ~collective shamanic noosphere~ or are they acting as a dionysian release valve for the values and ideals of the culture they live in - in which case, it *does* make sense to talk about 'cultures' (whatever 'cultures' are - like with Kiss or whoever, is '80s America' the 'culture' or is '80s American hair metal which treated women as disposable objects' the 'culture' - or both? (or indeed 'intensely racist, xenophobic 70s Britain suddenly being confronted with the children of Windrush' in the case of Clapton and Stewart)) - as being sick and wrong and should indeed be problematised and addressed?

That 'I don't care about the personalities of music' can also easily become a way of erasing the context and culture in which those 'personalities' (or the media interpretation of them, which is all most of us ever have access to, except in rare cases) were formed.

Dylan - “...it’s not me. It’s the songs. I’m just the postman; I deliver the songs”

― Master of Treacle

I'm not sure if Dylan truly 100% believes this, of if it's a way to carve out some privacy for himself, to prevent listeners from digging and exposing as much of his private life in order to find "the real meaning" to his songs.

This is going to be quite a nuanced post, and also probably quite a lengthy post, so a note to any particularly reactive readers: please read the whole thing, at least twice, before coming back with a 'wtf, wtf, wtf?!?!?!' type reaction?

I think it's remarkable to read the 1980 Bowie interview where he explains away his fascist phase. Suddenly, I was in a situation where I was meeting young people of my age whose fathers had actually been SS men. That was a good way to be woken up out of that particular dilemma... I imagine it's how it actually went down, but what a thing to say -- that he snapped out of it meeting the children of Nazis, of all things. Victims are just totally erased in his reckoning.

― I Hate the Aedes (morrisp), Wednesday, 30 September 2020 19:46

I do not mean to come across quite so Captain Save-A-Bowie on this thread, but Bowie is one of those artists where multiple possible readings collide and contradict, so he functions as a kind of liminal zone, where the friction of these issues comes most visibly into play.

I say this as a British person who lived for decades in the US - there is a HUGE cultural gulf in understandings of 'what World War II was about' between the US and the UK, and therefore a deep divide on conceptions of 'who the Victims Of The Nazis *were*'.

And understanding this gulf is the key to understanding the meaning/intention of British use of Nazi imagery in the 1970s. (And I want to be clear here, that I do believe there is a subtle but important difference between the outright xenophobic racism of Clapton, Morrissey and friends; and the antiauthoritarian 'it is YOU who are the real nazis here!' posturing of the punks, Siouxsie, Joy Division, and yes, Bowie-before-Berlin.)

How Americans experienced World War II was fundamentally different to the way the British did. That to Americans, it was something that happened 'over there' - the primary inklings that something bad was happening, was waves and waves of Jewish refugees arriving, saying 'something terrible is happening to the Jews in Germany!' (Xenophobic Brits didn't allow Jewish refugees; our ignorance was not innocence!) Up until Pearl Harbour, WWII was something Americans experienced at a remove, something terrible happening to other people, mostly Jews. After America joined the war, Americans experienced both Britain and Germany, London and Berlin as blasted, rubble-strewn, bombed-out warzones and didn't see British devastation as anything more notable than what had happened on the Continent. My understanding is, that it was mostly American troops who liberated the concentration camps, and saw, first-hand what Nazis had *done* to Jews, understood the full horror of it, and returned with a conception of WWII as something that happened to Jews, that the victims of Nazis were Jews.

To be perfectly crystal clear, I think this interpretation is correct - the stated enemies of Nazis were Jews. The Nazis were inherently anti-Jewish.

The British experienced WWII in a fundamentally different way. The British experienced WWII as invasion and aerial bombardment - WWII was something that (unlike WWI) happened on British soil - it was air-raids, the Luftwaffe, V-2 Retribution Rockets - The Blitz writ large as THE defininitive and quintessential experience of What WWII was about. (And we love to erase the participation of the rest of the world in the World war, like, we have this weird distorted mental self image of ~scrappy-doo British fighting off the Nazis single-handedly!) But WWII, to the British, was something that happened TO the British, that the victims of the Nazis were The British!

This is *A* reading, and an understandable, though woefully incomplete, reading. I lived in a 70s London that was still full of bombsites, my own street has chunks missing due to V-2 rockets, I have parts of my own extended family dead because: Nazis. But I think this reading has done a great deal of damage to the British - like, our continuing, long-term obsession with WWII and our WWII-victim-mentality is one of the grossest things about Britain, and feeds all kinds of nasty things from poppy fascism to Brexit. (Like, the continued insistence that Germans = Nazis and Nazis = Germans, rather than Nazis = Nationalism both fuels and elides our own grotesque behaviour towards Europe, towards refugees and immigrants, towards large swathes of our own nation.)

But I do believe, that in the context of 'Londoners were also victims of Nazis' - knowing that there is a sense that victims have a different relationship to oppressors, in terms of cosplay, mockery, etc. - that a ton of 70s punk swastika-abuse (does Bowie's cocaine psychosis sieg-heiling come under this category? I don't know!) was done with that mindset - the British were the victims of the Nazis, it's different for victims to play with the symbols of their oppressors, a lot of the 'YOU are the real nazis now!!!' posturing of it was specifically addressing that kind of grotesque WWII-obsessed British victim mentality. Which makes sense in the cultural context of seeing Nazis as something that happened *to* Britain.

That I read Bowie's remarks about meeting the children of the SS in that light - it wasn't that he met the children of the SS and had sympathy with the SS! It was that he met people who had real experience of the SS - and was shocked to discover that the British were not the 'real' or even primary targets of the Nazis - that was Jews (and also homosexuals, the disabled, Gypsies, Poles, and several other groups far worse off than the victim-playing British with our Blitz obsession and our bombsites). It is often a shock to the solipsistic, insular British that the Nazis had victims *other* than us and that is something that is gross about us British. It's not that Bowie didn't care about the victims; it was that he had previously had a completely different understanding of who the victims *were*.

tl;dr Britain's weird victim mentality relationship to Nazis is hella complicated thanks if you made it to the end

i get that with Siouxsie and the punks, they were pretending to side with the enemy in order to wind people up. but I always thought Bowie came to fetishise the Nazis via Crowley/ Nietzsche ideas: occult/ ubermensch. isn't that what "Quicksand" is about? he's drawn to fascism but also revolted by it?

Yeah, I don't really know with Bowie, and that's why I said I didn't know whether to group him with the punks 'victim'-rattling or not.

In which case, there could be another reading of his 'children of the SS' comments - that there is this tendency, the techno-fascism thing if you like, whereby people who think they are cleverer or brighter or more able than their companions can lapse into ubermensch thinking very easily. That, equally, discovering that the SS were not the ubermenschen of Nietzsche, they were ordinary, boring, petty bureaucrats who were actually quite dim and easily led - makes Bowie's disillusionment legible in a different way that doesn't reflect very well on him!

Like, I said, Bowie is a liminal case, where many readings are possible - but to me, that's what makes him interesting.

But maybe that's also the difference between the root of Morrissey's discontent - that at heart, Morrissey's victimhood does seem to revolve around his interpretation of his own difference; this secret belief that he is cleverer, more sensitive, more special than everyone around him, and that victimhood calcifying into hatred of The Other - that Morrissey did not actually have the self-awareness to climb out of the trap.

Maybe Bowie started with this same concept of *difference* - but somehow instead of lapsing into the Morrissey victim-trap of believing himself cleverer, more sensitive, more special, which is a path that can lead to fascism, and recognising his own tendencies towards that and attraction to it - somehow *was* aware of it, and chose a path of humility instead and exploring difference, rather than blaming The Other for the friction of difference?

I don't know if I'm explaining this very well! (This is all stuff I wrestle with)

excellent post, branwell. i don't have much to add as it's late here and i'm not feeling too coherent, but i've enjoyed reading your thoughts on this thread.

I don't think that misplaced feelings of historic victimhood are uniquely British at all.

But that opens up a whole can of worms: to what extent can you accept or even excuse people's political opinions or behaviour because of a different environment they were brought up in?

I'm not sure how my "American and British attitudes towards WWII are significantly different" turned into your "feelings of misplaced victimhood are *uniquely* British" but... OK?

I was more thinking of that these British attitudes are pretty widely shared among most other European countries.

Music is not a musician's diary. At least, not the music I listen to. It is organized sound. The reasons behind its creator's choice of sounds, and organizational methodologies, may be interesting fodder for discussion if I get the chance to interview them, but I do not see them — or the music as a whole — as a message directly to me, because I'm not Mark David Chapman. Nor do they particularly impact what I get out of the music, which is a simple question of "do I find this pattern of sounds beautiful y/n". Substitute other positive assessments ("exciting," "pleasing") for "beautiful" as necessary.

This is writing off a lot of the conditions and politics by which some of those organised sounds come into being. Xenakis' Persepolis was made as a commission for an Arts festival in Shiraz, a the time of the Shah (a lot of the avant-garde of the fifties and sixties took the Shah's money). Yes its often a beautiful work but it feels like the end of him as a composer too.

A lot of noise musicians have either flirted with fascism, or are fascists who pull out the 'transgressive' card when challenged on it. Some of those scenes are easy enough to ignore and not pay a lot of attention to but again its a thing to fight against and if you are writing it as beautiful with no context its just edgelordism and I suggest you buy a bunch of flowers instead.

people on this thread are having very different reactions to *exactly the same music* - most notably in people talking about their differing feelings on the specific example of Sonic Youth? How is Sonic Youth, just one band, 'different types of music'?

Am I wrong to assume you are being facetious here.

to similarly view other people in their lives: friends, partners, colleagues - as things because they never learned to *care* about the interior lives of other people. This is also a thing, that happens at the extreme end of 'only form matters' fandom.

One thing I'd hoped to get across in earlier posts is that reducing someone else to a wrong word or deed is another side of this same coin.

Gotta LOL at the suggestion that formalism itself is a character flaw bordering on sociopathy. You may be onto something :)

OK, an answer with 0 facetiousness in it: I really hope that all of my posts together have conveyed the idea, that I think that *context* really matters, on many different levels. (The context of the artist, and the context of the listener.) That there really isn't such a thing as pure formalism - or if there is, *pure* formalism is bad, because it strips out context and context is key to really understanding (though understanding isn't entirely necessary for enjoying?)

Far more facetious answer: yeah, formalism without context is a form of sociopathy ;)

Less facetious again: not caring about 'people' or 'personality' or 'context' in one category can be a red flag that a person really doesn't care about people or personhood or context in other categories. Not all formalists are sociopaths, but all sociopaths are formalists? (OK, that last sentence is facetious again, this not-being-facetious thing is hard for me!)

Just to add to comrade alphabet's post, stressing the separation (or rather: the miscommunication) between art and artist (and audience) does not mean that its sociopolitical and historical context flies out the window. Sometimes that context is even more marked in a given work than it is in its creator's own 'life', and I certainly don't believe that music should be written about as though it exists in a vacuum when there are other pressing concerns to take into account. That said, if a work's context exhausts the work of art, then there is no art as far as I'm concerned. There needs to be something in excess, something that escapes verbal and political mastery for there to be an aesthetic event.

One thing I'd hoped to get across in earlier posts is that reducing someone else to a wrong word or deed is another side of this same coin.

It is, but they key of this whole issue is that this one wrong word or deed might overshadow every single thing they've ever done. People get extremely, and understandably, irritated by the holistic, empathic approach of "he may have abused all those women, but he has given generously to charity, brought joy and happiness to millions, and was a very good boy to his mother".

I just would like to say that Branwell's long post re: British punk and Nazi imagery is 100% fire and a context that never would have occurred to me.

OK, an answer with 0 facetiousness in it: I really hope that all of my posts together have conveyed the idea, that I think that *context* really matters, on many different levels.

That's very clear, and your thoughts are interesting. I believe that they are inextricably tied to a particular niche of pop and rock music, and a particular mid- to late 20th century type of music fandom. (No, I don't mean anything gendered by that, so let's please not go down that alleyway.) Given the music I listen to 90% of the time, I think context can matter, but it doesn't always matter. For example, what does the sound of Autechre reveal about Sean Booth and Rob Brown as people? I love their music and/but I have never read an interview with them, and don't need to in order to love their music. Second example: pianist Matthew Shipp is my friend. The fact that he is my friend makes me excited to hear his newest album, but it doesn't change anything about the music itself; I never feel like there's anything personal being communicated by him, to me, through the medium of the music. (Shipp, FTR, is one of those artists who believes the cosmos speaks through him when he's at the keyboard — he has a highly personal belief system that's more or less a version of mystical Christianity, but I am thoroughly atheistic and yet we're still friends and I still find his music beautiful, even when I can easily hear the "churchy" parts of it in the chords he chooses, etc.)

Eh... I don't think that is tied to a particular niche of music at all, otherwise you can basically throw out the entire field of musicology

It also needs to be said that if you think stan culture (which is all about probing into the perceived inner lives of your favourite musicians) is a superior instance of profound empathy towards other humans, that's kind of hilarious tbh. Keep in mind that the quasi-religious worship of musicians – most of whom are absent gods in that you will never meet them or even be part of their circle – is itself a form of objectification, and a violent one, at that.

It is, but they key of this whole issue is that this one wrong word or deed might overshadow every single thing they've ever done.

This is an absolute straw man of a thing that (almost*) never happens!

*qualifier added only for that one dude who is going to come in with that one specific exception to the rule

For example, what does the sound of Autechre reveal about Sean Booth and Rob Brown as people?

Oh man, but how much I could tell you about the weird IDM fanboy fetishisation of Sean Booth and Rob Brown as somehow not-people tells you about IDM fanboys and how they conceive 'people' but let's not go down that route!

It also needs to be said that if you think stan culture (which is all about probing into the perceived inner lives of your favourite musicians) is a superior instance of profound empathy towards other humans, that's kind of hilarious tbh.

And again, with talking about 'stan culture' you are taking the *extreme* of one approach to fandom, and using it as a stick to beat the entire approach. Like, "all fans who are interested in personality and context are crazed stans" isn't any different from "all formalists are sociopaths" - an un-nuanced and reductive take.

lol coming from the person who argued that formalists tend towards psychopathy. Your posts were good but that was some obvious trolling on your part.

great posts Branwell, but I must note that Kiss was a 70's thing :)

I mean it may have something to do with the fact that the biggest guy in the IDM scene happens to have a personality (played up or not) that's totally in line with the weird ass music he makes

Booth & Brown are pretty endearing to me in that they come off pretty normal, almost embarrassed about the kind of music they make

very interesting posts by branwell, good stuff

To reiterate in more direct terms: is it just me or are we conflating the artist and the work's context? Because while the former is part of the latter, the latter greatly exceeds the former.

Excessive focus on the artist's biographical personality can just as easily become an excuse to avoid sociopolitical and historical considerations if all you care about is the artist's supposed 'psyche' or whatever.

There's something here about ineffability and transcendence here that fittingly I'm struggling to put into words, those glimpses of god or beauty or awe or compassion or lust, unstable magic spells that are easily broken by dissection, politics, or by Morrissey being a prize dick.

come now, that dick is no prize

yeah it'd be a most underwhelming raffle item

Hey Branwell

I love your points, esp. the Nazi imagery one.

I argue that all fandom is harmful-- even seemingly innocent fandom. It's not about the act, it's about the psychology, which is rooted in entitlement and control.

To my mind, there is no difference in the psychology between "going up to a musician and asking them for a hug" or "going up to a musician and presenting them with a drawing you made of them", and "posting a rambling Tumblr call-out about a musician you're actively stalking" and "starting a Twitter account to falsely accuse Justin Bieber of having sexually assaulted you" and "breaking into Kevin Bacon's private residence once a week for a year" and "sending a bomb to Bjork's house" and "killing John Lennon"-- or, for that matter, posting tweets claiming that Mark David Chapman is a "hero" for having murdered John Lennon (for having committed partner violence against Cynthia Lennon), which is a tweet I see resurface once in a while.

It's all part of the same psychology, to me. Imagine if a stranger approached you and asked you for a hug? Or if a stranger approached you and gave you a drawing they've done of you?

(Or, imagine if you experienced an extremely traumatizing moment wherein your famous ex-husband was murdered by a stalker, and then, some forty years later, people use his history of having-abused-you as a basis to claim that this man who stalked and murdered your ex-husband is some kind of hero?)

It is so, so intrusive. The method of expression might change, and be (in most cases) benign, and totally acceptable, and even (in many cases, on the part of the musician) received with pleasure, but the root psychology of what is happening is the same:

Society has a bizarre sense of entitlement upon the bodies, attention, time, private lives and political views of people who create art.

I myself am far, far closer to hearing music as "a series of disconnected notes". I am not a sociopath; I have just enjoyed music since I was 2, when listening to Pachebel's Canon on repeat at that age was blissfully unimpeded with any care for the artist's biography.

When I listen to lyrics, I usually am making them about myself, and my own experience. This is why we commend good lyricists for tapping into a "universal experience". When Justin Bieber sings "my momma don't like you, and she likes everyone", I feel it, because the lyrics reflects my own experience with my ex. I do not give a shit if he's singing about Selena Gomez-- such a line of inquiry would be intrusive-- and I care even less about who Ed Sheeran, who I assume wrote the line, might have been writing it about.

There is a difference between "allowing the biography to colour one's appreciation of the work" and "allowing artist biography to completely overshadow any other perception of the artist".

I think it is part of my anti-carceral attitude that I continue to enjoy music made by criminals (which, in my library, range from Bobby Shmurda to Charles Cohen).

Typically I am more likely to 'cancel' a musician from my own listening habits for one of two reasons:

- recurrent demonstrations of "dickishness" in the media. I can handle criminality, or vaxxer bullshit, or conservatism, and so on, but I can't handle, say, Mark Kozelek calling Laura Snapes a "bitch", or writing that lame song about War On Drugs.

- times when a musician (or other artist's) personal biography becomes far, far too intertwined with their work for there to be any distinction between the two. This includes individuals for whom the subject matter of their work reminds me far too much of their crimes (Woody Allen, R Kelly). This includes individuals for whom the subject matter of their work reminds me far too much of their racist views (Morrissey). This includes, oddly enough, musicians who have nothing but good intentions, but the overtly biographical nature of their art, which forces me to conflate their personhood with their music, makes me feeling deeply coerced and uncomfortable (A Crow Looked At Me, and several subsequent albums; this is not a personal grudge, I just don't like listening to such deeply personal stuff.)

Preach it, fgti!

"Fandom" doesn't necessarily mean you want to interact w/musicians. I've usually avoided even talking to them at the merch table or whatever. But I still like to read interviews with them, if I'm a fan.

It's very weird to me, this phenomenon. I cannot imagine ever being confronted with the irl personhood of a visible content-creator and feeling like this person deserves any different treatment or level of privacy than a random stranger.

I did have a year of fandom-- Tori Amos, of course-- but it was when I was 17. Then I turned 18 and I stopped conflating person and work.

That said, I do have an anecdote that springs to mind that pretty accurately describes the phenomenon I am decrying-- and it pertains to my own behaviour.

There was once an occasion where I was backstage after the show of a pretty-famous band, and there were a lot of people, including celebrities, there. I was moving through a crowded hallway, and I saw an old friend at a distance. I thought, "oh my god! I haven't seen him in so long!" I tried to remember his name as we drew closer to each other. We made eye contact. He smiled at me, a big grin. I smiled back. We said hello! We shook hands! We hugged! I said, "it's been.. years? Wow!" He reciprocated these statements, big smile, "it's been so long! get a drink! let's catch up!" I excused myself immediately to get a beer.

I walked to the bar and racked my brain as to who this person was. I suddenly realized it was Seth Myers. We had never met. This was before he had his own show, I knew his face but his name wasn't immediate. I just had seen him, a lot, on SNL. I had a relationship to his work, and in that instance, my own brain completely divested Seth of his personhood, believed I was entitled to a hug from him. My brain, even not knowing who he was, identified this complete stranger as being someone with whom I was familiar. This is what I'm talking about when I'm talking about "fandom"-- the false sense of familiarity with an artist that "consuming their work" creates.

This thread is such a good read, lots to think about.

"Typically I am more likely to 'cancel' a musician from my own listening habits for one of two reasons:"

― flamboyant goon tie included, Friday, October 2, 2020 11:44 AM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

As in you no longer support them going forward, or do you mean overall (past work too, regardless of how intertwined it is as you described)?

@ morrisp-- it's hard to get the terms correct. I also claim to be a "fan" of this musician or that. I write e-mails of appreciation to musicians when they make something I think is beautiful. I don't think it's weird to, say, give a gift to an artist if you like their work.

I guess what I'm talking about is "toxic fandom"-- except "what I'm talking about" extends to benign, widely accepted expressions of appreciation for an artist (meet and greets, i.e.), to which the application of a "toxic fandom" label would be contested (although I contend it's the same psychology), and it would extend to general attitudes of intrusiveness and entitlement in music journalism, and it would extend to the general way that many people tend to digest and enjoy music, etc.

This is a great conversation but I also now want to see footage from an epic fgti/Seth Meyers road trip

xp Ok... but I'd also point out that many artists these days actively encourage fan engagement via social media, meet-and-greets, etc.

lol well if I've learned one thing from this thread it's that Seth Myers is apparently an incredibly nice dude

I do feel bad for famous people in that aspect, I did that once to the frontman of a mildly famous band, I happened to bump into him outside twice before the show and chat him up, and he was super nice, but the 2nd time I asked if he remembered me from last time and clearly he didn't and he visibly seemed to feel bad about it. meanwhile I can't remember a person's name that I met 10 minutes ago and I feel really bad when someone asks if I remember them and I don't. much less someone who like, drove out to see my band

I consider myself a fan of the albums. I am not a fan of the artist because I don't have any problem not caring about specific albums of theirs that don't appeal to me. When I think of Picasso I picture the works individually. I prefer album covers that don't feature pictures of the artist. I just want it all to contribute to the aesthetic. The person behind it doesn't play into this at all, which is why I also get upset when the artist's behavior and "cool" look/attitude validates the music itself for people. Whether they look like a bohemian or an accountant is so besides the point, unless their specific art related opinions undermine their art.

As in you no longer support them going forward, or do you mean overall (past work too, regardless of how intertwined it is as you described)?

Oh, I just mean I don't listen to them any more. Which means I sell their records, etc.

xp Ok... but I'd also point out that many artists these days actively encourage fan engagement via social media, meet-and-greets, etc.

It's always been the case! Cultivating toxic fandom in consumers is how pop music gets made and sold

Ok - but I don't agree that it's necessarily toxic (unless/until it becomes toxic); or that you can blame fans for taking artists up on their offer to identify with them, engaging with their public persona, etc. Are fans supposed to be "above that" or something?

I don’t really think much about artists’ personal lives or abhorrent beliefs unless they put those things front and center in their work. I can still listen to James Brown but I have no desire to listen to Red House Painters anymore.

excellent point, agree

This is a great conversation but I also now want to see footage from an epic fgti/Seth Meyers road trip

Rather. And echoing DJP, excellent Branwell post re WWII's legacy.

FGTI, with all due respect, we have such completely different definitions of fandom that I don't even feel like we're having the same conversation at all?

I argue that all fandom is harmful-- even seemingly innocent fandom. It's not about the act, it's about the psychology, which is rooted in entitlement and control.

This is just... no? Like, it feels like you have predefined "fandom" as "toxic fandom" and back-engineered aspects from "toxic fandom" to retroactively apply to "all fandom" in a way that feels... well, actually quite personally insulting, TBH.

Like, there was a time many years ago when I would have considered myself to be a fan of your previous alias - listening to your albums, attending shows, consuming interviews and other media around you; we have, actually, as a matter of fact, met in a fandom context, at one of your UK shows though I'm quite sure you don't remember it, because it passed in such an uneventful manner (I never, ever ask people for hugs because *I* do not like hugging) - yet, because of your negative view of 'fandom', I'm now tarred with this brush? Is that how you feel about me? I don't want to be in discussions with people who view me so inherently negatively.

And I've seen you literally do this to a former ILX0r who was a known, established, honoured guest almost to the point of friendship, fan of a Famous Band - like, I had been in fandom contexts with this band, with her, and saw how *they* and their road crew treated her, (the kind of fan where the road manager rings her and asks if she needs a lift to the venue because they know she's slightly disabled?) and how she treated them in return. That they *welcomed* her (and I'm sure you see this as fake and false and 'just business' because they needed her custom - but this is a band who are actually notorious for being spikey and abrasive to entitled fans so I don't think so) - and yet because *you* were so uncomfortable with the idea of "Fandom" itself, you turned around and tried to cast her as a stalker, as some kind of psychopath - and that level of projection was really not OK.

Like I understand why you have the feelings you do, that you have been the focus of obsessive and toxic fandom, and have been stalked-for-real, by fans. And I am sorry that you had these experiences, and I understand the trauma and damage that they cause, because I've been through some pretty extreme stalker-experiences with an ex lover. But to turn around, because you have had this shitty experience with toxic fandom, to say that "all fandom is harmful" - that would be like me saying "Because I've been stalked by a man, all men are inherently stalkers!" You are allowed to have your own discomforts about your relationship to your own fandom and how fans treat you - but you do not get to make sweeping judgements about the fandom of other people. That's actually kind of a grotesque distortion.

This doesn't make me see my style of Fandom differently. This makes me see *you* differently. And I think I need to peace out on this conversation now, because this could get very personal very quickly. Cheers.

wtf

@ Branwell

Part of the reason why I've sought to engage with people so plainly and openly in both this environment, other digital environments, and irl, is because I hoped that, in doing so, I would foster healthy relationships with individuals who enjoy my work. This has largely been a positive endeavour-- I was just thinking earlier about meeting crüt after a concert some ten years ago. I have never considered you as engaging in any "toxic fandom" toward me, and have always shared a mutual appreciation for your own work. I furthermore think of "toxic fandom" as being a dynamic, an act, a psychology, and one that is pervasive and colours the way that music is digested, written about, sold, etc. I think that it is exploited by certain musicians-- and certain musicians even exploit it unknowingly. (A friend of mine, in an argument, once accused me of "capitalizing on my white twinkiness to sell records". I blanched, and had a rechercher moment where I interrogated if this was true, and responded that I felt I had actively avoided this, and he responded, "it doesn't matter; you still profited from it.")

"Toxic fandom" is tough to label or discuss because of the wide-ranging breadth of behaviour that it entails-- from "asking a stranger for a hug", to "mail-bombing a musician", to "including unnecessarily lurid details about a musician's personal life in the scope of a 'review' of a piece of their work" (to that last point, I'm not talking about discussions about a musician's problematic behaviour so much as, say, subjecting a female musician to the male gaze.)

And I must correct you, regarding this former ILX0r. You did not "see" me do anything to them. The only observers to our interaction were themself, and myself. I did not post about what happened here, or engage with this individual any further, and I would ask that you not put me in a position where I'd feel compelled to talk about something that happened eight years ago on this board, as I do not bear this individual any ill will.

I have no idea who Branwell or fgti are. Odd thing to step into.

I used to play in a band called Gay Dad

good drummer. great look

Wanted to return to the "shamanistic" discussion upthread to say that for me, it's not that I see the music (or writing, or whatever) as something divorced from the artist who created it, more that I'm fascinated by the extent to which some artists have sides to them that they can only access, or can access most fully, through the work and in the space of creating art.

This is something I think about a lot re: Kipling, because when he wrote fiction he was broad-minded, thoughtful, compassionate, deeply accepting of other cultures and religions. (There are moments in Kim where he comes across as 100% tree-huggin' hippie.) When he wrote poetry, which he basically used as his Twitter account, he was every conservative New York Times opinion columnist rolled into one.

He was two people, essentially, and he acknowledged it - "Something I owe to the soil that grew/ more to the life that fed / most to Allah who gave me two/ separate sides to my head." He thought he was a staunch conservative imperialist, but when he sat down to write about characters he was able to draw on a part of himself that he may have been only marginally conscious of: the artist who sympathized with the marginalized and saw everyone, regardless of race or religion, as a real and complex human being. There's a story where he observes, apropos of something or other, "A man's work will try to save the soul of him," and on some level I think he knew this was true of his own work.

There are certainly artists who I just want to toss in the trash, I'm not saying there aren't. But to me there's something compelling in itself about watching art trying to save the soul of a deeply flawed human being, whether or not it succeeds or is even capable of succeeding.

I realize that some fans take things too far.

That said, I love music and also love meeting the people who make the music. I was able to do so as a member of the music press for many decades at levels ranging from fanzine to professional writer to hobbyist. I like picking the brains of musicians and finding out things about them that made them the artists and persons that they are. I always considered it an honor to have their time and ear and I always hoped that my efforts might prompt someone to check the band out band maybe become a fan as well.

I have also spent time as a citizen, a fan, with no ability to help the artist other than support them financially. Fortunately I am in a position to do so so I buy CDs, buy concert tickets, buy merch.

I do not consider these purchases to mean that the musicians have an obligation to spend time with me, especially since I am not meeting them at sound check for an assigned interview or speaking on the phone for the same purpose. However I still enjoy meeting bands. I don't do autographs anymore - stopped many decades ago when I started writing for national magazines and felt it was unprofessional - but if nothing else I enjoy telling a musician that I really enjoyed their work and why and asking questions that I feel are relevant about their music.

Overall I have seen musicians - even ones with reputations for being very prickly with fans - get super excited when a fan can show them they they get it. Artists like to be "got." When I ask a band if something influenced a song that wasn't totally obvious but it turns out I was correct, musicians seem very pleased. When I tell someone I saw their band the first time in town and now they're huge, they seem happy to meet someone who helped them get to this new, bigger venue. I am not someone to bring artwork but I have seen bands get super excited when a fan gives them something that the band inspired.

Aside from feeling that FGTI is just way too cynical for the room (that room being any room I feel comfortable in), I think he misses a point that NOBODY FORCED YOU TO BE A PUBLIC FIGURE. And yes, the moment you step outside the basement/garage and attempt to perform for people who are not mom/dad/spouse, you are now a public figure. Gay Dad didn't put out quirky tapes for pals, they signed to London Recordings who sold their music on their behalf, gave them tour support, gave them money to record. Gay Dad toured and presumably got paid for these tour dates; people certainly paid their money to see the band.

Now, unless there is a monster who held a gun to your head to force you into all of these terrible things, you did so willingly. You are a public figure - maybe not on the level with New Order (former London labelmates!) but still a public figure, one who relies on the open wallets of those fans to continue being one.

If you want to be a politician, you have to shake hands and kiss babies. If you want to be a rockstar (or if those words make you laugh, merely want to make music you like with people you like and for people who like it), you have to have expect that some of those fans will want to meet you. That's how these things work.

(There are exceptions to this but they are rare. Neil Peart famously didn't want to see anyone but when they were playing clubs you bet your ass he dealt with it. Some musicians cultivated images where interaction with fans was counter to that image, like Ghost. Good luck being either huge enough or gimmicky enough to pull either of those off.)

This doesn't mean that fans should feel entitled to your time. You should be able to eat in a restaurant without being asked for an autograph. You should be able to watch a concert that you aren't even playing without being bothered by people. If you are running to the stage to start your set, nobody should be shocked you don't have time to chat. If you're exhausted after a show and want to chill out on the bus, that's completely understandable.

But putting people "wanting a hug" (in my case I appreciate a handshake) or an autograph or a picture on par with genuinely disturbing people is tone deaf and offensive. Your band would mean nothing without those people. They promote your band with the shirts they paid you to wear. They promote your band on social media with that picture they took with you and only asked for the amount of time from you to take it. They work shit jobs so they can buy tickets to your concerts and music. They tell their friends who great your band is.

So your way to say thanks is to say that they are the next Nathan Gale or Mark Chapman? What a piece of work you are.

Maybe you quit being a Gay Dad because you really had a problem with all of this, in which case, good for you, you really shouldn't be in any position where you may be forced to interact with people whose only fault is that they want a little of your time. Play in your basement for the four walls and ignore them all you want. Those walls won't bother you. Enjoy your solitude.

Fortunately from what I have seen most musicians do enjoy meeting fans because the vast majority of them know what this social contract entails, and make no mistake it is a social contract. To conflate what nearly all fans expect regarding interaction with musicians they enjoy and support with a vast minority of people who overstep those lines is offensive and wrong. You want to be a misanthrope, that's lovely. Have at it. But don't sign with London Recordings.

fgti, if you didn't want to talk to me outside your concert, you didn't have to but you coulda signed an autograph for Matthew. That's my little brother, man, he's only six years old. We waited in the blistering cold for you, for four hours, and you just said no. That's pretty shitty, man, you're like his fuckin' idol. He wants to be just like you, man, he likes you more than I do. I ain't that mad, though I just don't like bein' lied to

well I even got the 1994 demo produced by Jim Irvin. I got a room full of your posters and a poster of you on the cover of Select. I like your appearances on TFI Friday too, that shit was fat. Anyways, I hope you get this man, hit me back.

I am beside myself here

if Gaz Coombes didn't want me to send him nudes every day he shouldn't have joined a band in the first place

I don’t get wanting to meet artists/musicians, I must not like music enough!!

I had a dream where I hugged mick jagger. Another one where I shot and killed zombie Lou Reed. That’s enough for me.

I think it all boils down to how personal and interwined with the artist’s own personal experiences or made-up character the lyrics are. In instrumental genres you can be listening to brilliant music without awareness on what an unsavory person is behind it - e.g. Miles Davis, Aphex Twin - making it fairly simple to listen without any contextual noise, but in genres such as say, folk or hip hop it’s harder since lyrics in that style are usually made to reflect very personal views and experiences.

There’s definitely a double standard based on lyrics content - that’s why a wife beater like John Lennon has his musical legacy mostly unscathed and an artist like XXXtentacion has a big stain on his. The former wrote about inane things like love and fighting inequality, the latter had his persona built around being edgy and dark.

uhhhh I'm guessing you've never listened to the Lennon song "Run For Your Life"?

I have to make four lasagnas today so I can't type long

Politicians, if I'm being as charitable as possible, get into politics because they have law degrees and recognize a need for reform in their constituency and decide that they might be the most capable individual to enact these reforms. Surely there must be an unanticipated moment for all of them when their good intentions (again, being charitable) start to feel misunderstood, when their opponents or the political journalistic community bring their personal life (rather than their professional efficacy) into the dialogue. This is to say: politicians choose their profession because of perceived personal aptitude and a belief that their contributions might be valuable, not because they're delighted to step into the public eye and suddenly have their personal lives laid bare, and their bodily autonomy (and that of their families) become compromised. But I'm just being charitable, I don't personally know any politicians.

Musicians, on the other hand, I'm more familiar with-- and similarly, what draws people into the profession is a love-of-the-craft, the encouragement of their social circles and the industry-at-large, and personal aptitude. I, myself, at age 25, when given the opportunity to leave my desk job and pursue a professional music career, was very hesitant. It was only when my colleagues at my desk job gave their full-throated support and expressed a deep belief that I should pursue a professional career in music, and guaranteed a place for me should I change my mind, that I quit and started pursuing it full time.

"You chose to be in the public eye"-- do musicians actually do this, though? I think of certain colleagues of mine who have greater success, but maintain little-to-no social media presence, and do not participate in online discussions (such as these). Many musicians realize, early on, that maintaining a direct line of access between themselves and the public is a net negative, and they make it their one and only aim to build a giant castle and in it write the names of those who are not allowed to visit the giant castle, and circulate this list to security staff.

I am not putting the Mark David Chapmans of the world-- and believe me when I say that every musician with any level of visibility has experienced a harrowing experience with a stalker, where their safety has been threatened-- "on par" with individuals who want a hug and a handshake. I am trying to communicate, clearly: there is a societal tendency for people to conflate an artist's work with an artist's personhood. I do not argue that we can (or should) "separate the art from the artist". I do argue that we should work to remember the intrinsic humanity of artists, and attempt to reform the feelings of entitlement over an artist's personhood that a relationship with their work can oftentimes create. This phenomenon-- that of entitlement-- is demonstrated in a wide spectrum of behaviours, ranging from the benign (and even welcome!) acts of "being asked from an autograph in a restaurant", to the terrifying, such as "individuals lurking outside your house for days on end".

What I don't think people realize-- or maybe people do-- is just how pervasive is "intrusive behaviour" on musicians at all levels of visibility. I know two artists (at an approximate level of visibility as Ted Leo, i.e.) who have had to take out restraining orders against family members. I know another artist who was being stalked and had to install security cameras at their house. I myself had a harasser whose behaviour was so intrusive, and my request for "no contact" resulted in such rageful retributive acts, that the distress of the situation resulted in a suicide attempt, and (subsequently) thousands of dollars of legal fees spent just to get them to leave me alone. I said, more than once, regarding this situation, that I actually wished they had just Mark David Chapman'd me. I would have preferred to have been shot in the head than have to suffer what they put me through-- and, most days, when I think back to my attempt, I wish I had succeeded; this is the extent of the trauma I experienced.

So it frustrates me, a little, maybe, when I read that maybe my problem is that "I chose a career in the public eye", and that I can retreat to the solitude of my basement should I feel threatened. I kind of bristle at being called misanthropic, too-- I'm here, being open and communicative with relative strangers, attempting to parse opinions and respond with my own.

I could keep typing but I have to make some lasagnas now

thanks for that, fgti

I’m sorry you had to go through that, fgti, and I’m sorry you had to read that nyc native post

I apologize, fgti, for how hard I laughed at that NYCNative post

Haha no I laughed at it too don't worry.. I didn't think NYCNative was off-base. I sometimes just feel as if I'm not communicating clearly

uhhhh I'm guessing you've never listened to the Lennon song "Run For Your Life"?

― sleeve

Haha I was about to post “run for your life” being a noticeable mysoginistic lyric

I have never listened to "Run For Your Life" with any feeling other than JL was singing from a character's perspective, and his actual artist's voice was being critical of individuals who would espouse those beliefs. Then again, if we suddenly found out that Randy Newman owned slaves, we might change our reading of certain of his songs as well

hmm I'm not enough of a Beatles geek to offer further perspective, but I always felt like the "used to be cruel to my woman" lines in "Getting Better" were a direct repudiation of "RFYL" from an older and wiser perspective (even though it was like two years, acid is a hell of a drug)

I mean it could be both, right - "Run For Your Life" as a character sketch informed by self-criticism, Lennon exploring a POV that he disliked but also fundamentally understood & identified with; "Getting Better" as a more directly autobiographical acknowledgment of his own past abusive behavior.

I actually find the lyrics on “Getting Better” more questionable than those in “run for your life”. It feels so wrong how normalized and simple the whole thing is: “hey I used to beat my wife, but now I don’t. I’m getting better.” It’s not like it’s a health issue, like eating less sugar or doing more exercise.

I think the lightweight feel to "Run For Your Life" makes it more off-putting - it seems so tossed-off and artless that it's hard to think of the lyrics as a character study.

I have a lot of disjointed thoughts about the thread topic, and I thought Branwell's post re: Bowie and Page was very good. I was irritated by the rush in certain circles to condemn Bowie right after his death - like, this stuff was all out there for the prior decade while he was being canonized by younger generations, and his actions, while certainly creepy, seem to revolve around his massive self-regard and delight at being this sexual idol for everyone he encountered. Whereas reading about Page, and particularly reading the Ellen Sander article, leaves me feeling so disturbed by the malevolence that the band showed towards women that it's hard not to think of when listening to them.

Van Morrison is kind of a funny one because as far as I know, there's no evidence of him doing anything particularly heinous (I guess until the Covid stuff which could certainly harm people if anyone's looking to Van for pandemic guidance), no accusations of predatory behavior or abuse or whatnot, he's just very consistently a grumpy asshole to almost everyone he encounters. I feel like with many musicians hearing, "he's an asshole" means something like "be careful if you're alone with him" or "stay away if he's drinking," and with Van it's just a statement of fact and nothing more.

Was also thinking about Celine, and how i loved Journey to the End of the Night, but I've never read any of his writing post-Bagatelles; in part because of my knowledge of the person he evolved into, and in part because there are only so many ellipse-filled paragraphs of ranting that I can read in one life. But I'd say reading Journey you don't have to separate the art from the artist, you can be moved by the anger-is-an-energy style that propels the book and also be aware that this is reflecting a state of mind that under a particular set of conditions moves very easily into fascism and focuses that anger on a vulnerable target. And I'm sure there are valuable things in the later books if I ever developed the inclination and stamina to read them.

isn't the difference between xxx and john lennon more about who the fans for each artist are & the respect they're accorded in society vs. anything to do w/ how they approached their art

Run For Your Life isn't either sincere or serious, the disconnect between the jolly music and the horrible lyrics is the whole joke, it's a pretty good parody of a certain awful strain of rockabilly music.

(citation needed)

Have we talked about Swans in this thread yet? I stopped listening to Swans. They were one of my favorite bands. Donated my shirts to charity shops.

To be honest, I feel the better for it.

Who are the ILXors for which this isn't really an issue besides me and unperson?

Do we have to pry your Cosby Show blu rays out of your cold dead hands?

I mean, I guess I would draw the line at *paying* to see Cosby, as some people were still doing until, like, 2015 ... But I did enjoy the Comedy Central special even though I'm aware of all the psycho shit he did

I def dont want to pay Louis money for his latest thing, but I'm sure if I saw it I'd like it. But these are less about separating the art from the artist and more about separating the criminal from the livelihood

His latest thing being his movie that was kiboshed, or his current standup set (or something else?)

the standup set

Louis is interesting case – I think there are all sorts of ways he could have “bounced back” if he had handled things differently (after the stuff became public), but he chose not to.

> "You chose to be in the public eye"-- do musicians actually do this, though?

How do you *not* choose to be in the public eye if you get on stage and charge people to watch you play and attempt to sell (or have someone sell on your behalf) recorded versions of your music?

> every musician with any level of visibility has experienced a harrowing experience with a stalker

Even if a majority of musicians have some bad experiences, the majority of experiences as a whole are benign or even flattering for the musician.

Fortunately not every artist is an asshole like you.

the_asshole_expert has logged on

his movie that was kiboshed

I'm sure I wrote this elsewhere, but I Love You Daddy is a fascinating trainwreck absolutely worth pirating. breathtaking levels of hubris at work.